Creating a tutoring website: 5 recommended website builders |
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Every serious tutor will surely want to have his/her own webpage out there on the internet, because it speaks volumes about his/her resolve and professionalism. You can pay a small fortune in exchange for a sleek and taut looking creation by an upscale IT design firm, or you can get your hands a little dirty by setting things up yourself for a nominal fee (which mainly goes to purchasing and maintaining a custom domain name). For the latter option, we suggest 5 different reputable website builders which we believe will make you sufficiently satisfied at the end of the day when your baby goes live. And yes, we are assuming you are 95% to a full 100% allergic to HMTL, CSS and JavaScript. So basically you will be largely dealing with simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You get) editors. 1. Wordpress   If you have never heard of Wordpress in your life, you probably don't hail from Earth. Indisputably the most popular blogging platform, you can sign up for an account absolutely free. Hundreds of free themes are made readily available to tantalize your design palate, not to mention a whole universe of plugins which you can choose from to enhance your site's functionality. Document files (.pdf, .docx, .xls etc) and image files (.png, .gif, .jpg etc) can be hosted for free, so if you wish to share pictures and written stuff, Wordpress is your buddy. That said, if you wish to upload video and audio files, a Premium Plan or a Business Plan must be purchased. Both plans offer a free custom domain name (which means for example your website URL is located uniquely at www.mytutoringsite.com instead of a subdomain www.mytutoringsite.wordpress.com) and allow you to go under the hood to tinker with the site's source code. Oh, not forgetting it enables the removal of them annoying, irrelevant ads which show up ever so frequently. The business plan in addition also opens up a library of paid themes which you can take your pick from if you desire a higher degree of design sophistication. Do note though there is a completely separate entity called Wordpress.org which is not associated with the above-you are required to purchase a hosting plan first before you can install the blogging software. It is equally well-loved, so go for this if it floats your boat. |
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2. Blogger   It's so simple to use, even your grandma can probably roll out her own gardening blog with minimal issues. Signing up for a Blogger account is completely free, and your site will be named as part of the blogspot subdomain (eg mytutoringsite.blogspot.com) . The user interface is very intuitive, as you will be experimenting with block editors which pretty much emulate the general site outlook. You can also easily fashion widgets to doll up your website. The downside is that you can only upload image files to Blogger (these files btw will be automatically saved in a web album called Picasa for easy retrieval), so you will have to seek out other file hosting sites which can accommodate your .docx and .pdf stuff. Unlike Wordpress, you need not pay a single cent to obtain control over the template's HTML chassis. You can overhaul things here to generate a totally new skin for your site, though ensure you save your work constantly throughout the modification process. One used to be able to register a custom domain directly through Blogger for an extremely cheap 10 USD a year (with auto-renewal option included), however this is no longer the case. Still, you can purchase your desired URL through Google Domains and have it point to your Bloger blog rather effortlessly. ( Alternatively, you can go through third party vendors like GoDaddy and eNom, however you will have to personally adjust DNS records, CName A-Records and other various settings via the registrar control panel, and it could get quite tricky.) |
3. Webs  Webs isn't that difficult to use in all honesty, but it is known to be rather laggy and on occasion will suffer outages (a major one which lasted for a week happened in Singapore during December 2013). A free account grants you 42 MB storage space and 500 MB of monthly bandwidth, together with a limit of 10 webpages. If your requirements exceed these, you will be prompted to make a paid upgrade. A custom domain can be directly purchased from this website builder, however be mindful the propagation of changes isn't instantaneous unlike Wordpress and Blogger, so your custom URL goes live only after a few hours. Till then, things remain in limbo. A recurrent issue known to exist till this present day is that the page editor goes into an infinite loading loop if the side bar menu is enabled, so make sure you have that turned off before you start to blog. |
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4. Squarespace   Although Squarespace offers a very limited number of design templates, many of them scream elegantly minimalistic cum uber stylish. The website creation experience is silky and seamlessly delightful, even superior to that of Wordpress and Blogger in our opinion. A 14 day free trial period is provided for the individual to explore its offerings (during this period any site created will not be published on the internet), after which he/she must sign up for a paid plan (all plans include a free custom domain) if he/she wishes to proceed further. Also, you need to pay a little extra if you wish to own e-mail addresses associated with your chosen domain name (eg abc@mytutoringsite.com). A separate surcharge is incurred for every additional alias subscribed. Did we forget to mention you can also set up a virtual storefront complete with payment systems which can be easily integrated within your Squarespace website? Tutors with e-books and learning material to sell will certainly embrace this feature. |
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5. Wix   Wix has gotten the content management system (CMS) right-it offers crisp controls and navigation is a breeze. On top of that, it boasts one of the largest collection of writing fonts and even allows you to separately configure the site outlook as displayed on mobile devices (resizing, relocation and hiding of elements). Rolling out fanciful animations, installing slideshows and embedding glossy social media icons on web pages involve just a few simple clicks of the mouse. If there is anything we don't like, it's that everytime you hit the publish button, a screen will pop out nagging at you to purchase a custom domain from them. Plus at times the editor takes longer than usual to load properly, thus giving rise to a site building experience that feels less silky than it should. |
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Are you ready to begin building your very first website? |
