Hello! Welcome to the awesome world of web development. There are various ways of going about this task. I'll give you one logical flow that you can follow. Step 1 : Get your thoughts in order. This is very important. Chart out your requirements. Ideally, this list of requirements should not be changed much. Step 2 : Once you have your requirements ready, start thinking about implementation. Seriously consider CMS's like WordPress, Joomla, etc., They are highly under-rated, as they require very little coding knowledge as such. Step 3 : If you decided against a CMS, then you would have to know or learn some coding. A website is made of two components : A front-end, and a back-end. The front-end is what the user sees on his browser, and interacts with. Back-end deals with what content you're serving to the client and how you're serving that content. For front end, you'd need to know HTML, CSS, JavaScript at the very least. If your website has to be dynamic, you'd need very powerful backend coding. Common languages used for that are Python, PHP, etc., Take a look at syntaxes, etc., and figure out which languages you'd be most comfortable with, and learn. Step 4 : Before you even start coding, think about scalability. If your poorly coded website takes off due to some viral factors, the website will crash undoubtedly. You would have to re code the entire thing. Therefore, you would do well to keep that in mind and start coding. Read up on parallel threads, asynchronous threads, MVC's etc., for good pointers. Further, most web applications require some sort of databases. Check out MySQL, NoSQL or Mongo. See what you're most comfortable with, and extend. Keep checking for compatibility issues between your server side code and database interaction. Step 5 : Start coding locally. Install a local server, and start serving pages on your personal desktop itself. Meanwhile, decide on a name, and search for suitable domain names. Step 6 : After around 50% of the coding, start thinking about hosting. If you chose a PHP backend, various hosting companies like godaddy, bigrock, etc., will work for you. Else, start looking at heroku docs, and/or Amazon Web Services (AWS) Step 7 : Decide on hosting, and deploy code when its about 70% complete, so that you can test the framework you built. I'm assuming that the 70% includes all the groundwork, templating, etc., Errors can be fixed easily in this stage. *** Learn about version control, Git so that you can easily continuously deploy code, keep track of changes, etc., *** Step 8 : Start applying finishing touches, focus on robust, interactive User Interface. Use libraries, JS code available online for intuitive effects. However good your entire code is, if the user does not like what he sees, or how responsive the site feels (User Experience), he will not come back. Step 9 : Deploy all code. Side note : Google Analytics installation for user metrics Hope this helped !

Short answer: flexibility and customizability. However platforms like squarespace, Wix and Webflow are easy alternatives to build a website, they come with their own shortcomings. They're not easy to customize or sometimes even move to another platform. If they are customizable like WordPress, it's a real hassle to creating the specific features you want.

If you're a small business those services are great! Are you a bigger firm or company that wants more flexibility? Let someone else make it.

Some freelancers also use these services for some jobs. Some business owners simple don't understand design or the internet in general.