At Tanooki Labs, in addition to building some outstanding products for web and mobile devices, we also help entrepreneurs design and build the marketing websites for their products. After all, even if you build the most amazing product in the world, people can’t use it if they don’t know that it exists. And since these marketing websites are intended to be updated frequently by the entrepreneurs, we often use a website builder instead of hard coding the marketing site. This allows founders more flexibility to quickly iterate on messaging, imagery, and other marketing touchpoints. 

Because of this, we’ve become experts on the strengths and weaknesses of the various website builders that exist. Since we often get asked this question, we thought we’d share some of our favorites.  We’ve used most of these at some point over the last 5 years, and our new website (yup, this one!) is built using Duda. Let’s dive in.

VEV

VEV, a relative newcomer in the space, is a great platform with the best overall page scaling to date, which is important because it adapts the website to the desired screen resolution. VEV offers a wide range of components with the ability to fully customization of everything. The animation panel is ideal for adding scroll and page transitions to really bring your projects to life. From staging to production, VEV is very intuitive and comprehensible for the average user. 

Squarespace

If you’ve ever listened to a podcast then you’re probably already heard of Squarespace. The overall interface for Squarespace is very intuitive with extensive focus on user experience. From customer service, custom and pre-designed templates, along with seamless e-commerce integrations, the Squarespace ecosystem brings a lot to the table. This is a powerful tool that continues to get better every year. Squarespace is definitely more of a template-based site builder though, so while you can start from a blank page, the learning curve is steep and you lose the advantage of constant updates in security and features from the Squarespace team. Our Head of design, Dan Scholz, has multiple Squarespace sites for personal projects.

Duda

Our current favorite, Duda, is what we chose to power the new TanookiLabs.com. The platform is robust, allows designers to easily create individual templates and components, and provides excellent image scaling and animations. Duda also allows our design team to lock sections of the site’s design to allow entrepreneurs and other founders to manage copy and image selection. This is something that most other website builders struggle with, but is key for the marketing sites for our products. This, on top of its customizable scaling, CMS simplicity, and overall user friendliness, is why we often build our sites with Duda.