8 Low-Cost Tools to Build Your Business Website (No Designer Required)

What is one cost-effective software I can use to build a professional-looking website without a designer or a developer?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

html lolcat
photo credit: Noah Sussman

1. WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, but it’s not just for bloggers. WordPress is easy to set up and maintain. There are thousands of free themes. ThemeForest (http://www.themeforest.net) has a large selection of beautiful, professional designs. If you pick a WordPress theme for web designers it’s a guaranteed hit. These are usually the best designed. For most people, there is no reason to design and code a website from scratch.

Emerson Spartz, Spartz

2. Weebly

I’ve started two companies by building the first version of my site on Weebly. It has templates that will suit most businesses, and they limit choices to keep everything looking professional. Most importantly, the ability to drag and drop content fields will allow you to make the site truly yours.

Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches

3. WebPlus

The starter version of WebPlus is free. The program is customizable and also comes with 30 days of free hosting. You don’t need any knowledge of HTML to use it, and you can also import your own images and content.

Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

4. oDesk

Forget getting your web-savvy friend to set up WordPress whenever she has free time from her job, kids and life. oDesk is full of experts with a ton of experience in web tech (especially WordPress, PHP, CSS, etc). Grab a theme you love, buy a domain and then find an oDesker to get you set up in just a few hours. They even troubleshoot and can handle customizations!

Derek Shanahan, Playerize

5. Squarespace

With Squarespace, you can have a fairly well-designed website up in a matter of minutes. The platform has great e-commerce integration for easy use. If you do decide later that you want to customize a template further, Squarespace is developer-friendly and offers many tools for developers to be able to tweak it quickly and easily.

Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

6. Onepager

Onepager is a great tool for developing professional and customized websites without developers or designers. Not only is Onepager easy to use, but it is also mobile-optimized. I highly recommend it for small business owners or freelancers who either don’t have resources to invest in complex website design or who just want a professional-looking site quickly.

Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

7. Bigcommerce

Bigcommerce makes it quick and easy to build and host professional-looking e-commerce websites.

Josh Weiss, Bluegala

8. Wix

Wix is a service that offers a huge volume of free site design templates, along with the ability to customize and launch them without a designer or developer.

Benji Rabhan, MorrisCore