Best Website Builder for Summer Camps in 2023

Our #1 recommended website builder for summer camps is GoDaddy. Its tool has made vast improvements over the past few years and has become the simplest and most intuitive drag-and-drop website builder on the market.

Using the GoDaddy Website Builder for Summer Camp Websites

It’s important to understand what your goals are when you begin creating a website for your business. When making a summer camp website, the primary objectives of your site will be to:

• Use pictures and videos to show off your summer camp 
• Keep campers engaged during the off-season with connections
• Create an online home for new customers to find your business

Websites for businesses usually serve to connect with customers, sell products, and show what your business has to offer consumers. For a summer camp, you’ll be following a similar path in showing potential customers all of the amenities and activities you offer. 

With GoDaddy’s website builder, you can implement the “Images, Galleries, and Video” feature. This feature allows you to easily upload and edit pictures and videos for your website and beyond. For instance, you can post these same images and videos to social media accounts, once they’re uploaded to your website. 

You can also compile galleries of images, which can be labeled and posted to your website. These galleries could represent different summers or special events, such as the first and last days of summer camp.

By posting these images you’ll help past campers to relive their great experiences at camp. You’ll also be encouraging new campers to sign up. 

For those campers who will be returning next year, you’ll also want to keep them interested and excited. Pictures and videos are great for connecting with campers. GoDaddy also offers the connections feature for their website builder, which is designed to keep you in touch with returning campers as well as your staff. 

In connections, your summer camp company can store names and contact information. This comes in handy when trying to confirm returning campers. You can also narrow a search to find certain campers or camper specifics in your contact list with dropdown filters. 

You can also create email contact lists to stay in touch with your campers and camp staff for the off-season. Simply import your contacts and connect them with subscriptions to newsletters and other notable announcements throughout the year.

Utilizing GoDaddy’s website builder allows businesses of all types to maximize their connectivity and visibility. For a summer camp, your website serves as a perfect hub to relive old memories and prepare for making new ones.

Getting Started With GoDaddy

One of the other major benefits of the GoDaddy website builder is the ease of getting started. When you log in to the builder for the first time, you will see a two-question form. For “Choose a category,” type in “summer camp” in the provided field and click “Next.” Then, on the next screen, type the name of your business.

After about 10 seconds, GoDaddy will take you to the front page of your new website.

GoDaddy’s builder uses artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand your business name and type so as to construct a template that’ll best suit your business.

Once you make it this far, it’s as simple as customizing the information on the pre-built pages to match your business, and you’ll have a semi-custom website that’s ready to be published to the web — all in less than five minutes.

Of course, depending on the level of customization that you would like to do, you can continue to add, change, and move things around until you have your dream website!

Cons of the GoDaddy Website Builder for Summer Camp Websites

While this website builder is our recommended pick for summer camps, it’s not totally flawless. There are a few things that may push certain users to other builders. These cons include:

• Potentially overwhelming choices and variety— If you find yourself having trouble narrowing your options or struggle when choosing colors or designs, you might find the number of options overwhelming. The GoDaddy builder is designed with many options for each feature and website builder tool. This allows users the option to customize their website for specific business needs. Once you’re experienced using the builder, the choices will become more intuitive and navigation will seem more natural. Check out your options by visiting other web builders, such as WordPress or Wix. 
• Less expensive options can offer fewer features — For businesses looking to cut costs, some other website builders have lower price points than the GoDaddy builder. Web.com and WordPress both offer less expensive monthly fees, but for what is saved monetarily, you may lose some of the functionality or ease of build that GoDaddy can offer. It’s worth noting that GoDaddy’s monthly pricing is less than many other builder options. Compare and contrast the other build sites and we’re sure you’ll see why GoDaddy is often rated so highly.

For more information on the GoDaddy Website Builder, check out these articles:

• GoDaddy Website Builder Review

• How to Make a GoDaddy Website

• How to Use the GoDaddy Website Builder

• GoDaddy Website Builder Pricing and Plans

• GoDaddy Website Builder Examples

Web.com

Like most website builders nowadays, Web.com enables users to quickly create a functional website without needing to write a single line of code. It also includes an extremely affordable signup offer for the first month, which allows for time to learn the platform before having to truly pay for it. As one of the first website builders available on the internet, it has also perfected the art of drag-and-drop functionality and includes fast uptimes, allowing your site to be better optimized for search engines. 

The problem is that Web.com hasn’t entirely updated with the times. Its templates feel a bit outdated, and there are moments when using the editing tool feels a little less intuitive than it does on more modern platforms like GoDaddy, Wix, or Squarespace.  Additionally, despite the low cost of premium plans at signup, these prices skyrocket after the first monthly billing cycle. This may make it seem like an affordable option, but in practice that might not shake out to be true.

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular website builders on the market, and with good reason. This content management system (CMS) is highly customizable, endlessly flexible, and can be one of the least expensive options available to small business owners. WordPress consistently ranks as one of the best website builders in the world, and it can be a good choice for your business website.

However, WordPress does have its drawbacks. Site owners must purchase their own domain name and hosting package, and they also have to perform routine maintenance tasks like updating their website and plugins and conducting site backups. In addition, WordPress is not an easy-to-use builder, especially when compared to other recommended options like GoDaddy, Wix, or Web.com. Typically, we only recommend WordPress to business owners who already have experience with the builder or are more tech-savvy.

Wix

Wix consistently ranks high in our list of best website builders, and it’s easy to see why. Having been around for a while, Wix has updated well with the times and remains a very sleek, modern platform where users can create a high-performance website without having to spend too much time learning about web design. Its templates feature beautiful designs, and there are many customization options available — as well as a (very limited) free plan for users looking to save some money.

Despite all of this, some of these added features come with an extra layer of complexity. Using Wix’s editor is simply not as easy and intuitive as some of its competitors. Wix also lags behind when it comes to analytics and other basic metrics a small business owner will need to keep track of growth. Finally, despite offering a free plan, there are a lot of features missing from it — like a Wix subdomain — and Wix premium plans run a bit steeper than the likes of GoDaddy and Web.com.

Choosing a website builder is one of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to building your summer camp website. If none of the suggestions above seem like they will fit your needs, then you’ll need to select a different builder. This section will give you a framework to make the decision in the most effective way possible. 

Once you have an idea and guidelines of how you will make this choice, check out our Best Website Builder of 2023 review for several different options and reviews of each builder.

Ease of Use

The most important factor when choosing a website builder is its ease of use. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles or beautiful templates the builder has if you can’t figure out how to use it.

Of course, all builders will have a learning curve. But, some are just considerably simpler than others. WordPress, for example, is an absolutely amazing tool that gives you almost limitless flexibility but is one of the least intuitive builders on the market.

Most small businesses that use WordPress end up hiring developers and marketers to create and manage their websites. This is not a bad thing, per se, but it’s a decision you will have to make. After all, you know your business (and its needs) best.

Speed of Implementation

Similar to ease of use, speed of implementation is an important factor when starting a new site from scratch. When beginning a new business, you will have a massive number of tasks that need to be taken care of in order to get things going. Creating a website is absolutely one of the most important.

With this being said, it obviously makes more sense to use a tool that can have you up and running quickly. Some builders are better suited than others when it comes to a new site. 

Some give you a blank slate to work from, others give you templates, and others still use AI to understand your unique needs and help to fill in some of the blanks for you. The right answer for you may be different than for someone else, but understanding this will give you a massive advantage when selecting your builder.

Expandability

Expandability is less about what you want to do with your website now and more about what your long-term ambitions are. 

For example, let’s say that you are starting a basic website that helps your customers find where your business is and gives them multiple ways to contact you. Two years from now, you know that you want to have a full-blown software-as-a-service (SaaS) app on your website. There’s a good chance that the tools you need are going to be very different between now and then.

Something to note is that using one system doesn’t mean that you can never change platforms. That being said, migrating a site from one tool to another is usually a pretty in-depth undertaking and at least a medium-sized headache.

In the beginning, try to look forward and plan into the future for what your needs will be at different stages of your business. This will give you the insight you need to make the best decisions possible.

Additional Factors

Along with the three that we have mentioned, there are other factors that may guide your choice of website builder:

• Price — Naturally, price is a factor when choosing a website tool. If you’re starting a small blog, there’s no reason that you would need a major ecommerce suite. Keep in mind, however, that your business will be supporting this website, and hopefully, your revenue will make these $10 to $30 per month expenses look like a drop in the bucket.
• Templates — Good web design can be tricky. Do you know exactly what should go on your homepage? Having a large library of templates gives you a running start when it comes to designing the pages that will make up your website.
• Responsive Design — For the most part, all builders nowadays should have this figured out for you, but keep in mind that if your website doesn’t look good on all screen sizes (e.g., mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.), you’ll alienate a large number of your customers. Have you ever backed out of a website because it looked terrible on your phone? That is what you want to avoid for your own website.

Finding a website builder can be a little tricky. You often don’t know what you’re getting until you begin to use it. Luckily, we’ve done the leg work and have put the different website builders through their paces. Again and again, we found GoDaddy to be the best for summer camp owners looking to build a straightforward website for their campers.