What easy means in a website builder

Two different kinds of easy

Easy to start means getting something on screen quickly. Every builder is good at this, because it is what a trial is judged on and what every demonstration shows.

Easy to live with means changing something six months later, in a hurry, without breaking anything. That is a completely different property and it is rarely demonstrated.

Products optimize for the first because the first is what gets bought. The second is what determines whether the site is still accurate in two years.

There is a third kind nobody mentions, which is easy to hand over. A site that somebody else can pick up and edit without a briefing is a real property and almost never demonstrated.

How to measure it honestly

Time yourself building one real page, with your own words and photographs, from opening the tool to publishing something you would show a customer.

Then come back a week later and change it. Add a section, replace an image, move something. That second measurement is the one that predicts the next two years.

Our page on comparing builders covers the wider method. An afternoon of this settles more than any amount of reading.

Where ease is traded away

Against control, usually. A tool that makes every decision for you is easy and frustrating the moment you need something it did not anticipate.

Against structure, sometimes. Some easy tools produce pages whose heading order and markup are poor, which costs you with a screen reader and an answer engine alike, which our page on heading structure covers.

And against export. Ease of building and difficulty of leaving frequently travel together, because both come from the tool controlling everything.

Against clarity, occasionally. A tool that hides complexity can also hide what it is doing, which makes a problem harder to diagnose when one finally appears.

What actually makes a builder easy

The list below is what separates genuine ease from a good first ten minutes. None of it is a feature, which is why none of it appears on a comparison table.

• Defaults that are right, so nothing needs adjusting
• Fewer decisions rather than more options
• Changes that take one action rather than five
• Nothing that breaks when you edit it
• Undo that works reliably
• A preview that matches what publishes
• Help that answers rather than redirecting

Easy is not the same as quick to finish

The slow part of a website is almost never the tool. It is deciding what the pages say, gathering photographs and writing content that is specific to your business.

A builder that saves an hour on layout and leaves the writing untouched has saved an hour of a job that takes a fortnight. That is worth having and it is not the bottleneck.

Our page on describing your business covers the part that actually takes the time, whatever tool you use.

Ease does raise the chance of finishing at all. A tool that makes each small step painless is one an owner returns to, and returning is what gets a site completed.

Easy for whom

A tool easy for somebody who builds sites weekly may be baffling for an owner who edits twice a year. Judge it as the person who will actually be doing it.

If that person is not you, have them try it before committing. The most common failure here is choosing on behalf of somebody who then cannot use it.

And check the second person can get access. Our page on online builders covers why a site editable from one personal account is a risk.

What to be suspicious of

Claims about minutes. A site in minutes is a template with placeholder text in minutes, and the gap between that and a site you would show a customer is the entire job.

Demonstrations using prepared content. Everything is easy with the words already written, which is precisely the part that is not.

And any comparison where ease is scored numerically. It is a property of a person using a tool for a task, and nobody can score that for you in advance.