Why automated site builders suck!
So if automated site builders really suck as the title of this article says, why do so many people use them?
There are many reasons. First, site builders are cheap. Why pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars doing something that you can accomplish yourself, (sort of), with an online site builder. Cost is a very big reason for people to be attracted to site building tools.
Second, people assume that because technology has come so far “there must be a program I can use to do this”, and our WANT IT NOW! society does no thelp matters.
Beyond price and instant gratification people assume the same things they have always assumed as long as the web has existed. People think that “If I build it they will come”. This is something I could write another article on by itself, but needless to say this is not, and has not ever been true. Just because a site is built does not mean it will be found by anyone, serve any purpose, or generally produce any return on invested money and time.
The web is still a wild fronteer in the realm of technology. Because so many Billions of websites exist, and people all over the planet are putting them up at an ever increasing pace even mom and pops businesses need a professional web presence with the experience of an expert team behind them. Websites need to stand out of the pack to produce any results, and the look and feel is one a small part of that puzzle.
Lets look at some really good reasons that site builders are a waste of your time, money, and energy.
Search Engine Invisible
While there are some really good Content Management System (CMS) out there that are search engine friendly, but I have only seen one or two that was turn key. Even the great ones like wordpress, drupal, and CMS Made Simple need to be integrated, installed, and tweaked for your individual site. This is the reason that working on drupal sites and modules is the number one outsourced web development task in the world!
Site builders are way behind when it comes to search engines. Google, Yahoo, and now Bing all visit your website and read its contents. They then make decisions about your sites content, and relevance in relationship to every other site on the web.
Lets give you a good example. When you title a page in your site “Purple widgets” and then describe those purple widgets within that page Google and the rest scrutinize that content. They run mathematical equations against the content of your site to determine what your pages are about. If you were smart and followed all the best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your page would come up in google when you type the words “purple widgets”. If you are lucky google will decide your page is more relevant than the other 2,330,000 pages with the same words in them. This means you will show in the top 10 results.
Site builders just don’t build pages that show up in search engines. Even the ones claiming to be search engine friendly are full of it! When you build your site with an online site builder instead of a full blown CMS you are creating a site that is Search Engine Invisible. Considering that most sites get up to 80% of visitors from Google and Yahoo.. this is a site killing problem. Your site will never get off the ground to accomplish your dreams if no one can find it!
Your Stuck
The other huge problem with site builders that even the very poor quality CMS aviod is the lack of transportability. When you build your site into an automated builder you can not take it with you when you decide you want to expand or build in functionality the builder can help you with. I see this problem all the time when I am forced to build sites from scratch because the clients existing site is in proprietary software that can not be moved to a real hosting environment. In most cases the designs are also property of the site builder and thus they own almost nothing for all their years of paying the monthly dues!
Poor code quality
Beyond all of the other issues we have already pointed out most site builders build very poor quality pages. This can be an issue for not only search engines but also the blind. Yep you got it, blind people surf the web to, and if your site is not accessibility compliant those people will never get the change to “hear” your site with the software that speaks the pages for them.
Just Say No
The web is not a place where the uninitiated can make a big impact. In fact its mostly full of junk, so standing out takes talent and experience. No matter how nice you think your computer generated website looks.. you should trust the experts and save your money for a website that will deliver the goods and an ROI!
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Aaron Mills is a Project Manager for Jailbreak Creative. He has many years of experience working in the web industry and regularly works with local and national clients on a variety of web projects.
Aaron has extensive experience working in both PHP and Ruby on Rails Projects. Aaron also does work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and web marketing. 
