CMS Critic

People’s Choice Winner for Best Website Builder is…

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This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Best Website Builder goes to Squarespace!

best website builder

Congratulations to the Squarespace team for their awesome work.

Squarespace’s mission is to provide creative tools that power the future of the web. From designers creating the next generation of web and mobile experiences, to anyone managing their own online presence for the first time, Squarespace provides elegant solutions that set new standards for online publishing.

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Since 2004 Squarespace has offered a fully-hosted environment for creating and maintaining a website. Known for its sophisticated yet easy-to-use interfaces, Squarespace’s do-it-yourself tools allow creative professionals, businesses, bloggers, and web developers to quickly and easily create and maintain professional, high-quality websites.

Our runner up for Best Website Builder for this year was Gutensite, which fought a hard battle and did a commendable job of making Squarespace work for their win.

This isn’t the end of the awards, however, as the Critic’s Choice portion of the awards which will be selected by CMS Critic will be announced soon.

  1. Squarespace
  2. Gutensite
  3. YikeSite
  4. Virb
  5. Weebly

Thanks to all for really driving hard for the votes and don’t forget to stay tuned to our site to find out which of our five shortlisted competitors below takes the Critic’s Choice Award, to be announced soon.

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Mike Johnston

Mike is a CMS Analyst & Consultant who founded CMS Critic in 2008. He regularly consults with companies to assist them with the CMS selection process and is available for speaking engagements. You can contact him here or follow him on Google Plus.

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  • Dennis James

    Congrats on an awesome win! Squarespace is a great product and it’s well deserved.

  • Ryan

    Really helpful. I’ve never built a site before. After much research over the past 24 hours, I’m going to give Square Space a go! Literally right now it’s go time baby!

  • Victoria Lord

    I am curious why SquareSpace won top honors as this announcement doesn’t really say what makes it stand above any of the others. I gave up on them pretty quick. I have been analyzing and working with a multitude of online web platforms Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace, Yola, WordPress, Webs, Webstarts, SiteKreator, LightCMS, Jimdo, Webnode, Moonfruit, etc., etc.

    The two that stand out for me in terms of easy use, cost, diversity of templates, etc, are Weebly & Wix. So I am very interested to hear more about why SquareSpace fits the overall bill. I found it limited in template design, especially for my industry. Thank you. I do appreciate your site in general.

    • David Needham

      Hi Victoria
      I have been looking for an easy-to-use Wiki/CMS. I checked out Weebly and as you say, it is so easy to use. Unfortunately it is not a templated Wiki, so I guess I’ll continue to look at Tiki WIki. My current prototype is on Google Sites and that is soooo difficult to use, and unpredictable, and flaky!! Some of it’s templates are good though, and initially it’s free- which is important for my prototype.

    • http://www.gutensite.com Chadwick Meyer

      Hi Victoria,
      Once you look at a lot of CMS platforms you quickly realize there is no single platform good for every type of website project or workflow. Some excel at certain things, others may not be as good at one thing but excel at a larger variety of things. Some have a nicer interface, others are easier to learn at first but less powerful in the long run.

      Squarespace is a great platform for certain people. They really deserve a lot of credit for the beautiful design of their control panel and the ability to customize things. It’s a lot more flexible than Wix or Weebly and it has more functionality. This is probably why there were chosen. But it does have a learning curve, and it’s better suited for designers who actually know how to design (because most people are not qualified to mess with design and still end up with a professional looking website).

      Gutensite on the other hand, has a beautiful interface but it is not as much of a “visual website builder” as Squarespace or Wix (not as much dragging and dropping). Gutensite separates the design from the content so that only professional designers (third party or in-house) interact with the core design elements, which protects the look of the website. It’s more of a content management system that lets you delegate content creation/management to team members with no design qualifications, with the confidence of knowing that the website will remain professional over the long run. Gutensite is also a platform with so much more functionality than these other platforms (content types and expert settings). Gutensite allows full customization of every aspect of the design or functionality, and it’s built to grow and integrate with your business as your business grows. So while it easily works for hobby website builders, it shines best for businesses that want to maintain a professional online presence over the long run.

      So it really just depends on what you need. If you are a professional business that wants to build on a platform that will grow with you, and you want professionals helping you build a great website, then Gutensite is a great platform for you. If you are a designer that is setting up websites for other businesses, and you want flexibility, and you want a team of technical people available to help you with any size project, Gutensite is a great option. If you are just looking to make a website with 5 pages, and you don’t need much more than basic pages, and you want to be able to drag and drop things, Wix is a good option. If you want a very visual, image based portfolio, Squarespace is a great option. It all just depends on what you need.

      • http://gravatar.com/victorialord Victoria Lord

        Hey thank you! I will give Gutensite a try. It’s good you mention SquareSpace is for image professionals as that’s a niche market, but seems to get a lot of attention in this arena of DIY websites.

    • http://www.johnmonterolaw.com John Montero

      Hi Victoria: I have been using Squarespace for my law office web page for about 9 months now. Very happy with them. It appears to be very SEO friendly. However, I almost went with Weebly. I found their design even easier to use. I eventually had to hire an independent designer who charged me a few hundred dollars to set up my Squarespace page for me. On the whole, it was money very well spent.