Ready made websites can mean lots of different things.
I’ve chosen to ignore the kind of ready made website you can buy for pennies on sites like eBayor even the ones where you’re paying tens (or hundreds) for a limited edition ready made site, restricted to a handful of people who buy the same content and template.
In my experience, those tend to be not worth spending your time on:
- Any written content is unlikely to be top quality, won’t be in your voice or style and is unlikely to rank in Google any time soon, if at all.
- The designs are rarely inspired and maintenance of them can be awkward.
- Even a pricier one I checked on eBay (with a buy it now price of $111) was just a template site promoting Amazon products. Nothing that couldn’t be done with a free or cheap theme and an Amazon store plugin.
Instead, I’m going to concentrate on ready made websites as being created with programs such as WordPress to allow you to work on the actual content of your website rather than how it’s glued together so that people can view it.
WordPress allows you to change the look and feel almost instantly – there are hundreds of free themes and thousands available on sites like Theme Forest.
Or you could pay someone to design one specifically for you. But in practice almost all the time I think it’s just as good to use a ready made theme and maybe get a header image designed on a site like Fiverr or Freelancer.
Often I’ll choose one or two or three gigs on Fiverr – the cost is almost always lower than a freelance site and usually faster.
Then you can tweak the functionality of your ready made WordPress site with plugins. Again, there are lots available. Check out my top 10 essential WordPress plugins here.
Although I can create websites by hand – I had to when I first started on the web – I’ll now almost always use WordPress to handle the basic functionality.
So long as it’s kept up to date, there’s no downside that I’ve come across for a regular website.
If you want an ecommerce (shop) solution then there are similar alternatives but that’s not something I’ve done or researched recently so I’m not going to cover those options here.
Once you’ve made your website live, the biggest thing you need to do is create content for it regularly.
It doesn’t matter how good your site looks if you don’t do that – Google will relegate you to an internet backwater if you don’t regularly add content and promote your site with things like videos and articles.