6 best Open Source to build your website development (Part 1)

There are loads of website builders available on the market including open source ones. It’s easy to get lost in the thicket of possibilities. We’ll show you the elements to consider while searching for the most reliable tool. Then we’ll take a close look at the several open source website builders.

What to look for in a website builder

Website builders are the tools that allow you to create a webpage without coding. Most of all, they should be easy and intuitive to use so that you wouldn’t have to spend too much time building your website. Let’s see other elements and features the chosen software should have.

Component-based architecture

Components are the ready-made elements like banners, text blocks, image section, and footer, just to name a few, that you can use to build your website. They give you great flexibility as you can arrange them the way you want. Once you do that, you need to customize these elements by adding content, graphics, and icons, as well as modifying colors and styles. You can achieve it all by yourself without spending money on the developers’ support. The pre-built blocks also aren’t assigned to the specific type of pages, so you can freely use them anywhere on your website, which saves time f.e. while building new landing pages. What’s more, when you change the design of a chosen component’s template, the adjustments are automatically applied on all subpages including it. Take a look at the other advantages of the component-based design.

Templates

Although we consider creating a website out of pre-built blocks as the most flexible solution, another option is to use the templates. They are made for the specific type of pages like homepage or services and have a set of fields dedicated for them. Let’s say you’re building the first kind of page. Then you’ll see elements like a slider, call to action, an image section with a place for three graphics, and a text area ordered in a fixed manner. You just need to fill them with content to create your homepage.

When selecting a website builder with the template architecture, make sure it contains a lot of templates to choose from. They should also be customizable and responsive (to look good on different types of devices). However, remember that using templates you can’t manipulate their layout, reuse the content, nor share it across pages.

Content management

While trialing a website builder, check whether it’s easy to add and change content, like text, images, videos, buttons, and forms in it. Make sure that interacting with content will be intuitive for a regular editor by testing e.g. how many steps it takes to edit some element.

Blog

Running a blog is crucial for many businesses to show their expertise to potential clients. That’s why a website builder should have an option to create blog posts, as well as assign the right categories to them. The latter makes it easier to browse articles on a particular subject. An additional asset will be having social media share buttons to enable the readers to distribute your content among their followers on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to increase your brand visibility.

Multimedia

We’ve already mentioned that a website builder should let you add visual types of content like images and videos. When testing a tool for building websites, check the exact possibilities it provides regarding multimedia. Here are a few aspects that are worth taking into consideration:

• formats – make sure you’ll be able to upload images in the different formats (PNG, JPEG, SVG),
• creating image galleries – they’ll enrich the look of your pages,
• embedded videos – check whether it’ll be possible to run a video on your webpage using the resource of third-party video hosting platforms like YouTube or Vimeo so that it won’t slow down your website.

Forms

Collecting contact information on your webpage is necessary for reaching the people interested in your offer. A website builder should allow easy creation of forms, as well as a possibility to select the fields (like name, email, industry, company size) that meet your needs.

SEO

With SEO-optimized content, your website is better visible for search engines and can rank higher on the result pages. That’s why it’s good to check if a website builder has a built-in SEO tool that lets you add the relevant meta tags, keywords, and alt texts.

Analytics

By analyzing the users’ behavior on a website, you’ll know what to add or improve on it. Check if a particular website builder offers a built-in analytics solution or enables integration with third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics.

Epilogue

In part 1 of the article, we introduced to you the factors you need to look for when choosing an open source code (Open Source) for your website. Please see part 2 of the article, we will introduce to you the open source website building tools available on the market.