Take control of your website

So you want a website for your business or your community? How you approach this not only has an impact on the possibilities when it comes to the design of the website, its functionalities, and its flexibility to grow and change. It also determines who the owner of the website is and who's in control.

So it's important to pause for a moment and think about how you're going to build your website or how you'll have it built for you.

"Taking control of your website" doesn't mean doing everything yourself. We know just as well as you do that not everyone has the skills to develop and set up a website. But that's completely unnecessary because as humans, we can help each other out. It's about taking responsibility for your choice of who you work with and making sure that, at the end of the day, they can't take your website away from you.

Why a tailor-made website?

Your website is not unimportant. It's a digital version, a digital representation of who you are and what you do. It should hold the content and information you want to communicate to your visitors. Most likely you really thought this through and worked on it with care. Ideally, you even made it into a creative and authentic expression.

So your website can be something precious. Something you created or had created with love, and are now proudly sharing with the world. Something that makes you and your business or your community visible and seen.

At least, this is exactly how we at Intercreate Online look at it. We are conscious of the fact that our clients are trusting us with something valuable and meaningful to them, and so we find it important to approach that in the appropriate way. Your website is yours and the functioning of your website is not tied to us. Your website always comes with an admin portal and at the end of our collaboration, you can simply take everything home with you, so to speak, and continue to use it, work on it, and even enter into new collaborations around it with others.

What about using a website builder?

Website builders, like Wix and Squarespace, allow you to easily create a website yourself without any technical knowledge. But they keep your website and the technical knowledge that comes with it to themselves. At the end of the day, they don't really give you anything, you have just been able to use them for a while. And when the collaboration ends, you're right back where you started. You can't export your website, you stay tied to the website builder you chose, and you don't really learn anything about how your website works.

On top of that, the functionality of your website is limited to the functionalities that they offer and you're also restricted in your creative expression in designing the look and the layout of your website.

A website builder can however be a solution to quickly get something up and running while you work towards a place where you can invest in having your own tailor-made website built for you.

Will I still be able to manage my tailor-made website's content myself?

Of course. At Intercreate Online, we choose to work with Strapi to provide you with an admin portal for your website. Strapi is a modern alternative to WordPress. Just like WordPress, Strapi is open-source. This means the software's source code is available to everyone, making it so that a community of invested developers will form around the development of Strapi, which then emerges a whole range of plugins that extend its functionality.

The advantages of Strapi to WordPress are mainly technical, but we will do our best to translate this into human language for you.

Strapi offers more freedom when designing a custom data structure for your website and is more pleasant to work with for developers. This means that, from a development perspective, it doesn't make much difference whether you want to publish simple blog posts on your website or, for example, recipes. These are both data objects with different structures: one has a title, a short description and a long text; the other has a title, a list of ingredients, some photos, and some text. With WordPress, if you stray too far from the standard blog post structure, you already need to start using plugins.

Strapi also offers some advantages when it comes to the speed of your website and separates your website entirely from the admin portal. This means you're not tied to Strapi either. Your website works in such a way that it doesn't really care about which system provides its data. With WordPress, your website and the admin portal are merged into each other. Once you choose WordPress, it's difficult to move away from it without starting again from scratch. Strapi can easily be replaced with another system without requiring changes to your website itself.

Creative freedom

Finally, developing a tailor-made website gives you complete creative freedom to design the look and layout of your website to your heart's content. You're not tied to templates or fixed components. Together with our graphic designers, you can let your creativity run free and create a truly authentic expression of yourself and your project.

Summary

Here's everything lined up once more:

| Website Builders (e.g. Wix or Squarespace) | Tailor-made Website (with WordPress or Strapi) | |--------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------| | Very easy to use without any technical knowledge | Technical knowledge is required, or you need to hire a web developer or a web agency | | Functionality is limited to what they offer | Necessary functionality can be developed | | Design and layout are limited to templates and fixed components | Design and layout can be freely designed | | Support for issues and questions is usually available | For support, you need to rely on the internet or hire a web developer or a web agency | | No maintenance required, this is handled by the organization behind the website builder | Maintenance is your responsibility; you can do it yourself or hire a web developer or a web agency | | With a website builder, you're basically renting a website: you have no ownership or control | With the right web developer or web agency, you're buying a website: the website is fully yours |

| WordPress | Strapi | |-----------|--------| | Has existed for a long time, is well known and widely used | Newer, more modern and still growing | | Open-source and expandable with plugins | Open-source and expandable with plugins | | In the first place made for blogs, but with plugins it can also support custom data structures | Offers the freedom to design complex data structures by default | | Website and admin portal are intertwined | Website and admin portal are fully separated from each other | | Design and layout are determined by the template you use. Most of the time existing ones are used but you can have a web developer or web agency develop one for you and set your creativity free | Design and layout are not influenced in any way | | It's possible to create a website with less technical knowledge, but you will likely still need a web developer or a web agency for support and maintenance | Technical knowledge is required, or you need to hire a web developer or a web agency |

This article was originally published on intercreate.online.