Builder or 101 Pixels
A website builder hands you a blank page. We hand you a finished website.
Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy sell you a canvas and a monthly bill. The design decisions, the words and the fiddling are still yours — usually at 9pm, after a full day on site. 101 Pixels starts from a template already built for your trade, fills it with your details and photos, and puts it online in an afternoon.
Build mine — free to try See one working Run the three-year numbers
- Build and preview it before you pay anything — the plan and the free month start when you keep it
- No setup fee, and no meter on the edits you make yourself
- Cancel any month; the words and photos are yours to take
The difference is not the price. It is what is left for you to do.
Both options cost about the same per month. One of them arrives finished, and one of them arrives as homework.
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With a builder, the first three hours are spent choosing
Theme, fonts, colours, header layout, button shapes, section order. None of it is the reason a customer calls you, and all of it has to be decided before the site looks like anything.
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With 101 Pixels, the first three hours are spent telling us about the business
Name, trade, town, phone, hours, services, photos. The layout, the words and the accessibility work are already done — by a template designed for trades, not for a design portfolio.
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What you get on day one is the same site either way
Home, services, work, about and contact pages, on your own address, with HTTPS. The difference is whether you got there in an afternoon or in a fortnight of evenings.
Side by side, in plain English
Written by somebody who has sat with a plumber at 9pm trying to make a builder theme look like a plumbing company.
| What matters | A website builder | 101 Pixels |
|---|---|---|
| What you get on day one | An account, a blank canvas and a template gallery. | A finished five-page site with your details, photos and hours already in it. |
| Who writes the words | You do — or an AI draft you have to rewrite because it sounds like a brochure. | Six services, four FAQs and four trust lines per trade, already written, then editable by you. |
| Who chooses the layout | You do. Every block, spacing and font is a decision. | Nobody: the layout is fixed on purpose, so it cannot be broken by accident. |
| Mobile and accessibility | Whatever you build. Contrast and labels are on you. | Checked before every publish — headings, labels, focus order, WCAG AA contrast in light and dark. |
| Search-engine basics | Often partial, sometimes an upsell; structured data usually missing. | Canonical tags, Open Graph, structured data, sitemap and robots written with every page. |
| Page weight | A framework, a dozen apps and a cookie banner before your first photo. | Static HTML and CSS. A sample home page is about 34 KB, with no framework and no external scripts. |
| What needs maintaining | Plugins, themes and a CMS that all need patching, and break when they disagree. | Nothing on your side. One codebase is maintained for every customer site. |
| Time to a live site | Days to weeks, spread over evenings. | About an afternoon, in one sitting. |
| Time per month after launch | Whatever the site needs: updates, a broken app, a layout that shifted. | Minutes, and only when you want to change something. |
| Cost, year one | Plan, plus premium apps, plus your evenings. | From $39 a month, your own domain, hosting and HTTPS included, and the first month free. No setup fee. |
| If you stop paying | The site goes dark and the export is a folder of shortcodes and widget references. | The site stops being served, and we hand over the words and photos as files you can use anywhere. |
| Who you email when it breaks | A support queue, a help centre, or a forum. | The person who built it. Next business day on Your Site, same day on Handled. |
| Contract | Monthly, but the effort you have sunk in is the lock-in. | Month to month, and nothing is held hostage: no export fee, no notice period. |
What three years actually costs
The subscription is the small number. The hours are the big one. Change any figure to match your own situation — it recalculates as you type.
Over three years
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Assumes you do the work yourself at the hourly value you typed, thirty-six months, and that a change takes about fifteen minutes with us. It is a comparison, not a quote.
When a website builder is the better choice
If you sell products with a real catalogue, need member logins, want online booking with card payments, or plan to redesign the site every season — use a builder or a specialist. Our sites deliberately do not do those things, and pretending otherwise would waste your first month.
A builder is also fine if you enjoy design work and have the evenings for it. Plenty of trade businesses do a decent job that way. This page is for the ones who would rather be on site than in a theme editor.
Build it first. Pay when you are happy with it.
The wizard is free: sign in, fill in the business, upload photos and publish. A plan starts when you decide to keep the site, and you can cancel at the end of any month.
Three questions that come up next
There are more on the questions page.
Can I move my current builder site over?
Yes. Paste your current address into the wizard and it reads what it can — name, phone, email, town, trade — then you check it. You do not have to retype what is already on the web.
Will I lose my Google ranking?
Rankings follow the address, the content and the links, not the platform. Keep your domain and the same service pages and you keep what you earned; structured data and the sitemap are generated for you. Nobody can promise a position, and we will not pretend to.
What if I want a feature you do not do?
We will say so on the first call and point you at somebody who does. A site that does five things properly beats one that does twenty badly, and we would rather lose the sale than maintain the second one.