GoDaddy Review: How Does GoDaddy's Website Builder Stack Up?
Though GoDaddy is most commonly known for its dominant website hosting and domain business, the company also offers a do-it-yourself website development tool. Building a website often takes the customer multiple days, and unless the customer is extremely tech savvy, he will need to hire a developer to handle things like plugins, hosting, and DNS issues -- a costly solution. Overall, GoDaddy's attitude is that they're already providing you with domain and hosting services and they can throw a website builder into the process, as well.
GoDaddy does allow users to build an adequate homepage, or storefront, for your company's website. But beyond this ecommerce storefront, GoDaddy's functionality is sparse and it's much more difficult to use than other solutions like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, or Ocoos.
Ocoos, for example, is a next-generation website-building platform focused on solving common sales and marketing problems faced by most small businesses.
Ocoos fully integrates the website's homepage creation, core offerings, and business interactions and operations -- all it's sales and marketing needs -- in an easy-to-use platform. A simple website can be created in as little as 20 minutes, and be optimized for use across different browsers and devices. Plus, Ocoos offers a concierge service that will build the website for the customer.
Basically, Ocoos handles your website's technology, so you can handle your business.
Now, let's take a detailed look at how GoDaddy stacks up against the competition:
"Design is not what it looks like or feels like. Design is how it works." Steve Jobs.
To evaluate website design products, you have to understand how a website is supposed to “work.” A website should:
Communicate basic business information -- like a company's services, location and contact information, and business hours, as well as relevant background information -- and be visible to search engines, such as Google.
Implement customer engagement: ecommerce tools for selling products and services, appointment schedulers, forms to capture customer information, analytics tools, and visible partner connections to build trust.
Front-end of business operations: The site should offer a central place for client contact information and sales information as well as a front-end database to drive future marketing.
Services, support and cost: the site should integrate additional business services, as well as necessary support at a fair price.
With these four things in mind, let's take a look at how GoDaddy holds up against the competition.
Homepage Development
GoDaddy: The company's primary focus is on homepage development, and offers a variety of templates. With this flexibility, you can personalize your website, but this runs the danger of creating a poor user interaction experience, and may not be optimized for search engines or mobile devices.
Tools that can drive traffic are supported via third parties, which means managing multiple website parts.
Ocoos: Ocoos offers customization around a core website design that's optimized for user interaction. Ocoos already supports tools that can drive website traffic, like a map, newsletter and public support, so there is no need for third parties.
Also Ocoos offers a unique B2B recommendations engine that allows your small business to cooperate with similar businesses to crowdsource marketing efforts, or simply build a circle of trust.
For example, a wedding planner may recommend a florist, limousine service, and caterer. If any of the business's websites drive web traffic, the other businesses benefit, and vica-versa.
Customer Engagement
GoDaddy: Ecommerce is limited to an online store for product sales only. In addition, you are responsible for obtaining external merchant account services.Third-party solutions are also necessary for online appointment scheduling, built-in messaging, and built-in discount managers. Support for complex transactions or documents is not available at all.
Ocoos: Ocoos provides native support for ecommerce with built-in merchant account capability as well as access to PayPal/Square. For complex transactions, Ocoos supports a variety of models, including a “deposit” flow where customers can pay a deposit and pay the remainder at point-of-sale, and a “Quote/Payment” flow where the customer can request a quote and then pay after the work is complete.
Ocoos has a discount manager so businesses can build discount codes which can be used to attract customers or evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Ocoos also supports an array of scheduling needs ranging from classes to consulting hours. These resources can be capacity constrained, sync with personal calendars, or be published in a public homepage calendar.
Ocoos also has a powerful PDF documents capability which can be used to publish complex information, integrated into a digital signature flow for legal documents, or attached as a receipt. Finally, customer interactions can be tracked outside of email and then integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Business Operations
GoDaddy: Hosting access is provided, but client management in via a third party, and sales tracking and flexible security are not available.
Ocoos: In addition to hosting, Ocoos has a full client database (CRM) which can be sorted and analyzed for remarketing efforts as well as connected to POS portal within Ocoos and Square.
A sales tracking database which can sorted and analyzed with the capability for export to tools like Quickbooks and import from POS tools such as Square, is available. Finally with Ocoos's flexible security feature, business owners can outsource marketing or analysis capability to team members without providing them sensitive financial data.
Support and Cost
GoDaddy: Phone and online support are available. GoDaddy offers a basic free version of its tool, but for a website with even basic capabilities, most business owners will have to opt for the $10+ per month option. A web developer will likely need to be hired to help with any additional services.
Ocoos: Phone and online support are available. Ocoos also offers a concierge service that will build the business owner's website at various levels of customization on top of the Ocoos platform. The Ocoos platform has a fixed price $25/month. The cost for concierge service is based on the level of desired customization and generally includes a higher maintenance fee.
