Is Google’s free website builder up to the needs of your business? (spoiler: it may not be)
This isn’t the first time Google is offering us what it hopes is the best website builder service – after all Blogger is still around and powers many websites out there, and there’s also Google Sites (whose review we’ve updated recently) but this website builder is more aimed at businesses, helping them manage their online presence and do business virtually. The attractive yet simple landing page for Google Website Builder illustrates how optimised and mobile-friendly this service is from the get go. Your site will be hosted at [yourbusinessname].business.site (with an option to link it to a custom domain name should you wish to). Being hosted by Google, it will come as no surprise that your site will be able to take advantage of that behemoth’s other services, such as Search and Maps, and be ready in next to no time. So let’s take a look and see if what you get is worth the hype. As you sign in, you’re asked to locate your business – which might be already listed in Google’s vast repository of knowledge. If it isn’t, just click on ‘Create a business with this name’. You then have to agree to the Terms of Service and Google’s Privacy Policy. As you’d expect, you can’t opt out of this. Google then walks you through the basic setup – you choose your business category (which you can add to or alter later), select whether or not you want your business location to be seen on Google Maps, specify which area of the world your business caters for, and provide your phone number. Once all this is done, after a few seconds, your Google My Business section will be open and ready for you to start customising. You’ll be immediately taken to the sidebar’s Website section, where you get to promptly select from 10 different themes for your site (a mixture of colours and font styles). There doesn’t appear to be any option to further customise these colours or those fonts.
