Original Post:

Hi all:

I was wondering if anyone had recommendations on website-builder websites. We have a pretty basic website and have been using Intuit's homestead.com for a number of years (both to host and to design the site with their "Sitebuilder" software). It was fine for a while but has become a bit of a dinosaur (no drop-down menus, etc.). It is also a pain to use their PC-only software as we've been on Macs for some time.

It appears there are quite a few options in this realm such as Squarespace, Webnode, Wix, 1&1 and others. Just curious if anyone had experience and feedback with any of those or others worthy of consideration.

Will post responses to the Wiki.

Responses:

I redid my website over the summer and chose to go with moonfruit.com. The level of polish in their templates is what hooked me. Their app was very easy to use.  Functionality-wise I didn't end up using anything complicated, so I can't attest to all of its features.

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We used a platform called Business Catalyst, and have a developer named Jared that has done a nice job building an e-commerce site for us. He's also a magento programmer, that seems to be the platform of choice for medium sized businesses.

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I've been using LiveBooks.com for my site. It has a pretty good selection of pre-designed templates and you can also custom create one for an additional fee. The web-based design and management of content is very intuitive. The downside is that they are more geared towards showcasing portfolios, specially photography portfolios - or at least they used to be - and so they are/were limited in terms of text and project descriptions.

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have you played with indexhibit.org? i know a bunch of my classmates have been recommending it as a portfolio site, so i don't know if it would be a good one for humangear, but thought i'd throw it our there.

the other one i hear getting tossed around (there's an email string going around the loft about this right now) is just going to wordpress and choosing a nice theme. the nice thing there is easy editability, pre-debugged structure, and dropdown menus to your heart's content.

i've used wix and would strongly steer you away from it. the whole thing is flash-based, and besides the myriad of inconveniences that it causes for you, it means no iphone/ipad user can ever access your content.

hope these two cents help.

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I have been very happy with Squarespace (www.zipinnovations.com)

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There's also http://virb.com/  but I havent actually used it, I must admit.