Having an individual website is crucial for any startup or small business to establish its online presence in today's digital world. With more and more customers searching for products and services online, not having a website puts you at a huge disadvantage. An impressive, well-designed website also builds credibility and trust with potential customers.
Luckily, creating a custom website tailored to your brand is now easier than ever before with intuitive tools like Unicorn's drag-and-drop website builder. Unicorn is specifically designed for startups and small businesses, with features that make building a website incredibly simple even if you have no coding skills.
In this post, we'll look at the key considerations when comparing website builders, highlight why Unicorn is a great choice for startups, and provide a step-by-step guide to building your own website quickly using Unicorn. Let's get started!
Choosing the Right Website Builder for Your Needs
With the many website builders in the market, it can get overwhelming to pick the right one for your specific needs as a startup. Here are some of the most crucial criteria to look at when comparing your options:
- Ease of Use: The website builder should be intuitive and easy to use, especially if you don't have coding skills. Look for a drag-and-drop editor that allows customizing site design and layout with just a few clicks.
- Customization Options: You'll want ample flexibility to tailor the design, layout, features to match your brand identity. Avoid rigid, cookie-cutter templates.
- Responsiveness: Mobile responsiveness is a must-have today with the majority of traffic coming from phones. Ensure the platform creates mobile-friendly sites.
- Templates: Pre-made templates allow you to skip starting from a blank canvas. Industry-specific templates save even more time and effort.
For startups and small businesses without dedicated web designers on staff, simplicity and efficiency are key. An intuitive interface, drag-and-drop editor, and ability to customize templates make a website builder much easier to use.
Some of the most well-known options to consider include:
- Wix: Extremely simple editor with great customization potential. Huge template library.
- Squarespace: Stylish designs and layouts. More limited flexibility. Expensive plans.
- Webflow: Powerful builder but has a steep learning curve with coding knowledge needed.
- Unicorn Platform: Made specifically for startups with simplicity and efficiency as top priorities. Drag-and-drop editor, industry templates, built-in integrations and optimizations.
- Shopify: Best for ecommerce sites. Fewer design customization options compared to other builders.
Unicorn Platform stands out with its focus on startups - it combines ease of use with customizability along with features like mobile-friendly templates, built-in SEO, email opt-ins, and more. This enables creating a tailored website aligned with your brand quickly.
Critical Considerations When Comparing Website Builders
Not all website builders are created equal. Keep these aspects in mind when evaluating options to choose the right platform:
- Ease of Use: Focus on the learning curve involved and how intuitive the editor is for beginners. If you don't have coding skills, pick a visual drag-and-drop builder.
- Template Quality: Well-designed industry-specific templates save time and provide good starting points for customization.
- Customization: Check how flexible the platform is in terms of tweaking templates, designing custom sections, modifying layout and styling.
- Responsiveness: Test mobile previews to ensure the builder creates mobile-friendly sites.
- Built-in Features: Look for forms integration, payment options, CDN, SSL certificates to get more value.
- Pricing: Compare pricing tiers to find an affordable plan for your budget as an early-stage startup. Some builders have expensive premium plans.
Top Website Builders for Startups
Here is a quick comparison of leading website builders from a startup perspective:
- Wix: Tons of templates and combinations. Great customization potential. Their Editor X can seem overwhelming initially.
- Squarespace: Stylish modern designs. Limited flexibility. Expensive plans are prohibitive for early-stage startups.
- Webflow: Advanced powerful builder but steep learning curve. Coding skills needed for full customization capability.
- Unicorn Platform: Made for startups focusing on simplicity, efficiency, ease of use. Impressive customization still possible.
- Shopify: Built for ecommerce. Lacks design flexibility and templates for informational sites.
Key Steps to Build Your Website with Unicorn
Ready to create your startup's website with Unicorn? Here is a step-by-step guide to building your site quickly:
Selecting the Right Template
Unicorn has a great library of templates organized by industry and niche like tech, agency, consulting, retail, restaurant, portfolio, etc. When picking your template:
- Focus on ones that match your industry and align with your brand image.
- Look for modern, clean designs - you can always adapt as needed.
- Check responsiveness and site speed by previewing the mobile view on phone sizes.
- Shortlist 2-3 favorites before deciding on the final one.
Customizing Your Template with Unicorn's Drag-and-Drop Editor
Once you've picked a template, customizing it is simple with Unicorn's intuitive drag-and-drop editor:
- Change colors, fonts, layouts by dragging and dropping elements.
- Easily add, delete or rearrange sections and columns.
- Replace placeholder images and videos with your own.
- Insert text for headers, paragraphs, testimonials and more.
- Drag-and-drop buttons, icons, dividers and other elements.
For example, leading AI startup AppBot used Unicorn Platform to quickly build and launch their sleek website in just a few days without any coding.
Optimizing Your New Website for Success
You've created a website tailored to your brand. Now let's look at some best practices to optimize it:
Essential Integrations for Conversions
- Add email opt-ins to build an email list for engagement. Configure pop-ups or slide-ins using Unicorn's built-in email integration.
- Use lead capture forms to convert visitors to leads. Embed forms from a provider like Typeform or Wufoo.
- Enable payments via Stripe if selling products or services. Set up seamless checkout with Unicorn's Stripe integration.
- Add contact forms so visitors can get in touch easily. Customizable forms can be inserted via the editor.
Optimizing for SEO and Speed
- Meta tags, alt text and other elements to improve SEO. Unicorn has SEO best practices built-in.
- XML sitemaps help search engine crawling. Automatic sitemap generation in Unicorn Platform backend.
- CDN for fast load times by distributing content globally. Unicorn offers CDN integration with Cloudflare.
- SSL encrypts connections for secure data transmission. Free SSL certificate included.
- Minify HTML, CSS and JS files to reduce sizes. Automatic assets optimization in Unicorn Platform.
For example, enable compression, browser caching, lazy loading images, and other performance best practices through Unicorn's speed optimization dashboard.
Monitoring and Improving Performance
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to benchmark your website's speed. Check mobile page load times under 3 seconds.
Analyze user behavior with heatmaps and scrollmaps to optimize conversion funnels.
Continuously gather feedback through surveys and polls to improve the experience.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Unicorn provides an easy way for startups to build a custom website quickly even without coding expertise. With its drag-and-drop editor, industry templates and built-in integrations, you can create an impressive website tailored to your brand in no time.
We recommend trying Unicorn's website builder free trial to experience it firsthand. Use this guide's advice to start building and optimizing your site for success. Let us know if you have any other questions in your website creation journey!
