WordPress was originally built for bloggers, then professional website developers and marketing teams. Its software underpins the websites of businesses such as The New York Times, eBay, and General Motors.

Most small businesses don’t have marketing teams and it can be very difficult to learn and use WordPress software, which is why it is typically recommended that small business owners hire a designer or agency to build and maintain a WordPress website. Assuming you hire a good designer or agency, you’ll have lots of design flexibility with WordPress — but you’ll pay dearly. Expect to shell out at least $5,000 for the initial launch. 

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Jottful was built for “the smallest of small businesses” — specifically for those with no marketer on staff, where the business owner is in charge of the website. Jottful makes your website for you (on the Jottful website platform), then co-maintains it with you. As the business owner, you’re responsible for updating the website’s text and images, as needed. Jottful is available to do all the more difficult and technical stuff for you.

This “co-maintenance,” coupled with more limited design flexibility, is what makes Jottful so notoriously affordable.

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You’re already crazy busy running your business. Don’t let getting a website turn into an all-consuming chore. 

WordPress

The WordPress software interface begins with the Dashboard shown above. From there you choose Pages or Posts (yes, they are different!) in order to be taken to a new screen where you change text or code to make edits to your website. For non-professionals, this interface can be overwhelming. 

You’ll have more ability to tweak the look and feel of a WordPress website, but you’ll have to hire a professional who can edit the CSS code to do so. 

Jottful

Jottful’s interface is called the “Magical Editor” for good reason: it’s super easy to use because it’s really just your website, but in editable form. You simply click on text or images to change them. Using this software requires no additional training.

Jottful’s design options are more limited than WordPress, but that’s intentional: it means that you, as a small business owner, don’t need to know how to write code and don’t have to hire anyone else to do it, either.

Given the ease of use discussed earlier, you won’t be surprised to learn that getting a WordPress website built typically requires hiring a designer or agency. Expect this process to take weeks (or even months) and cost thousands of dollars. A simple WordPress website for a small business often costs $5,000 or more, which is one reason why it’s unusual to see all-in pricing for a WordPress website on a designer/agency website.

Developed specifically for “the smallest of small businesses,” Jottful is far more affordable. Even though every Jottful website is personalized for each business’s needs, the average Jottful website is launched in less than a week and costs $300-$500. You can see all Jottful’s pricing right on their website.

Security certificate

Your website should use TLS/SSL protocol to reduce the risk the data between your website and your visitors’ phones or computers is intercepted. Not only is this good practice but the search engines prioritize websites that are secure and show them more highly in search results. 

With WordPress, you’ll need to register and renew a security certificate for your website. You may do that through the agency/designer who builds and maintains the website for you or through the website hosting company where Wordpress resides. 

All Jottful subscriptions come with TLS/SSL security certificates and the company automatically renews your certificate for you every 90 days.

Vulnerability to hackers

Don’t let bad actors take down your website.

WordPress is open-source software that relies heavily on third-party vendors to develop the plug-ins you’ll need to make your website do much more than just exist. Each plug-in you use creates a new opportunity for hackers to invade your website’s code.

You’ll need to frequently update both your plugins and the underlying WordPress code in order to take advantage of the security “patches.” And you’ll need to make sure all the other plug-ins are compatible with each new upgrade. If a plug-in proves incompatible, you need revert your code back to a previous version. For all but the most tech-savvy small business owners, this is a tall ask. Thus, most small businesses need to pay a designer/agency to assist with WordPress code updates on an ongoing basis. 

“WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Internet. It’s also the most hacked.” — Hubspot, Wordpress Security Issues

Jottful is closed-source software, meaning that its code is proprietary and closely guarded, accessible only to Jottful team members. It also doesn’t integrate directly with third-party software, so Jottful is far less vulnerable to hackers than WordPress.

Anti-spam

You don’t want to get a bunch of junk email from your website’s contact forms.

With WordPress you’ll likely use third-party plugins for your forms, so you (or the designer/agency you hire) will need to carefully research their anti-spam procedures before committing to a solution.

Jottful’s forms use a combination of spam-filtering software and “honeypots” that trick robots into revealing themselves. No anti-spam will be perfect, but Jottful’s is strong.

You can host a WordPress website on any web server. There are even some hosting companies that specialize in hosting WordPress “managed” hosting, such as Bluehost, Flywheel, and WP Engine. You’ll pay for your website hosting separately.

All Jottful subscriptions come with website hosting included, so you don’t need to choose another vendor and pay for that service separately. Jottful’s websites are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most reliable hosting platform on the planet.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy for increasing the odds your website appears prominently in search results on sites such as Google and Bing. 

Both WordPress and Jottful are technically sound when it comes to SEO: they create XML site maps, are mobile-responsive, use proper schema and tagging, and use security certificates.

The search engines also prefer websites that load quickly. This can be affected by the number and size of images you use on your website. All images uploaded into Jottful websites are auto-minimized and with WordPress you can download a plug-in that helps minimize image size. But page load speed can also be affected by the number of third-party software applications you have added to your website and WordPress tends to rely far more heavily on third-party plugins.

There are plugins with WordPress (e.g., Yoast) that help you (or more likely, an agency you hire) get more advanced with your SEO. For most very small businesses, this exceeds what is necessary and they’d be better off focusing on their Google Business Profile and working to get 5-star customer reviews across the internet. 

In addition to providing software and setup services, Jottful leads a series of free, customer-only SEO workshops where they help small business owners understand how to get the most bang for their buck when it comes to SEO.

It’s easy to overlook the ongoing maintenance needs and website cost of ownership. A common misconception is that a website is free once it’s been built, but that’s simply not the case. In addition to renewing your domain name (aka: your website address) each year, you can expect the following costs: 

If you choose WordPress, you won’t have to pay for the software platform itself (because it’s open-source software) but you’ll need to pay for your website hosting. You may also need to pay various vendors fees for the plug-ins you’ll need to make your website work. Because WordPress is built for professional website creators, most small business owners find it overly complex and difficult to learn and use. So you should expect to keep a designer/agency on hand to help with the needed software and plug-in updates (1-2 times each year) and any content changes you’d like to make over the course of the year. Expect to pay $100 - $150 per hour for these changes. 

Jottful, on the other hand, is an all-inclusive, single-vendor solution. With Jottful, all the ongoing maintenance costs are rolled into a single subscription, which you can choose to pay monthly or yearly. This includes your platform, hosting, software updates, and security patch costs, as well as hands-on assistance with any content changes beyond the simple text and image edits you’re empowered to make on your own.