Nothing to hate about Kopage
I don't get it
I understand not everyone or every business can justify the cost of a professionally designed website. I did a site for a racing organization, upwards of 40 pages plus a blog and discussion board. When we parted ways, they asked what it would cost to keep my design, I told them $960.00. Again I'm no pro, but I got the site to the top of search for that type of racing, needless to say they thought that was out of the question, I thought it was cheap.
Don't be that guy
My point is, I'm sure there are many small businesses, churches, organizations, clubs and so on that could benefit substantially from building and maintaining their own site. I built a site for a small coffee shop/restaurant and they were hard to work with. It was a family owned business of over 80 years and they didn't really believe in advertising, thought it was a waste of money and even told me they didn't need to advertise because everyone knew who they were. What? Everyone? Don't be that guy.
Benefits
There are so many benefits of building and maintaining your own site and the biggest one being the maintenance part of it. I couldn't imagine a small shop paying a web master every time they ran a new product line or were having a sale. It wouldn't be cost effective and probably wouldn't even be a good idea to even have a site in the first place.
Someone has to do it
So, maybe you're thinking you would have to hire a web master no matter what, but not necessarily. I've seen instances where the owner or owners' family took on the role of building and maintaining a website. Or, as in my case of my coffee shop story earlier, I worked there, I build websites, so I did their site. The advantage to them was that my hourly was much less than they would have had to pay a web designer.
Low risk trial
Ok, maybe everyone isn't in the position to do this, but what I would like to stress is for around $75 you could find out for yourself if this is something you could do or not. And if you decide in less than 30 days you can even get a full refund on your hosting charges, so at the worst you'd be out the price of a domain, around $15.00.
Affordability
Now this brings up an interesting aspect of sitebuilders. There's a lot of us that do use sitebuilders and I for one work for much less than web designers in my area. That said it would be much more cost effective to hire someone like myself and still have a quality, functioning site that can be affordably maintained.
Move your website
At some time you may have to move your website. This is one of the biggest complaints I hear about Sitebuilders, many say they can't be moved. That's not true, they can be moved by copying the site files and uploading them to another host. The thing to keep in mind with any Sitebuilder is they can only be moved to a host that supports the same sitebuilder. In the case of Kopage, there's not as many hosts that support Kopage as compared to hosts with RVSitebuilder, so you wouldn't have as many choices.
The best way to move a site is to move the whole Control Panel but if that's not an option you will have to move your site files and folders.
This is my first time using Kopage and I knew going in about moving the site and I don't find it to be an issue. Unless your moving the whole control panel, it's not easy moving any site no matter what it's built on. I read stories all the time of sites getting lost in moves, heck sites can get lost during server upgrades.
I've only been using Kopage a short time but the more I use the more fun it is. I just tried Sitepad to see how it compared, I gave up on it before I got 1 page started. Honesly, I literally had 4 pages and a Contact page done and published with Kopage in about an hour.
Seriously, if anyone wants to put sites up fast, Kopage is it.
No Customization
Another thing I hear and read is that sitebuilder sites ca't be customized. That may have been true when sitebuilders first started but it's not that way any more. Do you have 100% control like you do starting from a blank slate? No, but for me personally when I have to decide every page layout, pick where every picture goes, build a menu from scratch, making buttons from scratch, that's alot to consider and if you need a low budget site, it's hardly worth the effort.
That's where sitebuilders come in, which usually use drag and drop and blocks, modules and widgets to make design changes.
And sitebuilders that attempt to give control over every aspect on a page can be very difficult to use along with a steep learning curve. I want zero learning curve. I want to build a site fast, if I have an idea I don't want to lose my thoughts thinking about how I'm going to build a web page before I can start laying down website content.
I want a sitebuilder that I can jump right in, I don't want to read a user guide before I start.
And too much customization abilities can become a curse, pages get overdone and crowded and there's no flow.
Personally I think Kopage was well thought out, with just enough design capabilities to make a unique, well functioning website in a short amount of time.