Picking a Platform

With so many options for building a website, it can be difficult to choose the one that is best suited for your needs. Depending on if you need a blog or a store or just a basic website, choosing the right platform will ensure that you aren’t paying for a lot of features that you aren’t going to use while still allowing room for your business to grow and evolve over time.

Managed Platforms

In the world of web hosting, “managed” means that someone else is doing the behind the scenes work for you so that you can spend your time focused on more important things like creating content, marketing your business, and day to day operations. Managed platforms are an excellent solution for most small businesses as these types of businesses generally do not require a lot of custom code. Even organizations that are focused on a larger software component like a community site or web application will still use a managed platform for their marketing site and will develop a separate self-hosted subdomain for their technical application.

A few examples of our favorite managed website platforms are:

WordPress.com • Webflow • Shopify • Squarespace

Self Hosted Platforms

Typically best suited for businesses with multiple websites and at least one on-staff developer, self hosted platforms sit on top of a server that you maintain yourself (or pay someone to maintain for you). These types of websites offer a greater degree of technical customization and more control over things like custom code, however, they also require periodic updates to the server software, which isn’t done for you like with a managed platform.

Payload CMS • Sanity CMS • WordPress.org • Joomla! • Drupal

There are also many hosting companies that offer managed WordPress hosting. We won’t list them here because we more often opt for one of the solutions we display on this page, but for the sake of completeness, it is worth noting that such services are also an option.

Custom Code

Geared more towards more advanced websites like online stores, communities, and large web applications, custom code solutions are similar to self-hosted platforms but generally require multiple on-staff developers to maintain. These types of websites offer complete control over the code of your application and also require server maintenance and updates to be performed in-house. Many of the self-hosted options listed above can also include custom code but may not be capable of more advanced features available to custom code sites like certain types of animations and interactive media.

NextJS • Typescript • React • Node.js • Express • PHP

This is by no means a complete list of available solutions but represents the solutions that we have the most experience with. For example, we have been building websites with Joomla!, WordPress, and PHP for over two decades although not all of the technologies on this page have been around that long.

Request a consultation today and let us help you find the best solutions for your specific needs.