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Yola Review

If you’re looking for a website builder that offers you a lot of flexibility in design and layout, then Yola is the right choice for you. The design and layout of your website is controlled by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and many site builders limit you to their preset CSS color schemes and page positions, but Yola allows you to edit the CSS of your chosen theme which offers you more flexibility than many site builders.

Adding custom CSS to Yola

Theme Selection

One area Yola could improve on is the theme selection that they offer. After creating an account, I was presented with 10 of Yola’s free themes that looked poorly designed. After selecting a theme, I was asked for my business address which was added into a map on my contact page. Next, the theme that I had chosen loaded with a variety of page editing options above the theme. The layout of the editing tools are easy to understand and well organized.

Yola themes have a lot of flexibility in the design layout, unlike other website builders who restrict modules to fixed positions around the page.

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Yola Site Builder Tools

UI (User Interface)

Drag and drop seems to becoming the norm for popular website builders, which I can see why. Drag and drop offers a really easy way to build a website if you don’t know much about code and offers you the flexibility to edit your website without investing much time into the changes. Additionally, the code that has been written by the theme developers is better than most people can write, so by allowing you the ability to drag and drop preset widgets and page elements into placeholders, really protects you from messing up the code and changing the style to something undesirable and unattractive.

Page Editor

From editing the theme colors, meta tags, images, menu to font styles, the editor seems pretty much complete.
The free option will embed a small banner in the footer of your website that looks smaller than most website builder companies who offer a free version with banner placement in your site.

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Widget Options

There is quite a bit of flexibility with the widgets. You can add html widgets, so if you need to embed html code from a Youtube video or some custom code that you have written, you will have that option.

File Manager

Yola allows you to upload files to a folder designated to your account which is a great tool to have. Let’s say you have a custom javascript page or custom code that the website builder interface wont accept, having the ability to add a file that you can later reference can be really useful especially to more advanced programmer and designers.

In Conclusion

I would recommend using Weebly over Yola, but if you need more flexibility with your CSS styling and page layout options, then Yola would be a great choice for  you. They make it easy to add widgets to your page and the tools seem pretty organized.

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Weebly Review

Arguably one of the most popular and well liked website builders is Weebly. From its easy user interface to powerful website tools, Weebly takes first spot as our most recommended site builder. Even a beginner who has never looked at a line of code in his life can create a website masterpiece with just a few clicks. Don’t worry, the ease of use has not in any way compromised the cleanliness of the code generated by Weebly nor does it negatively affect the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website. Hands down, Weebly is the most powerful and easiest website builder currently available.

Weebly offers amazing customer service and is talked about by some of the biggest tech media companies in the world!

Media outlets that Weebly has been featured in

Let’s get started reviewing the Weebly Website Builder:

Sign Up Process

The sign up process is really easy and guides you through step by step.  Email verification wasn’t required which is a surprise to me because most website builders ask that you verify your email before creating your website. The entire sign up process took about 30 seconds.  Before I knew it, I was looking at my account dashboard and prompted with a checklist of what I need to do before I can launch my website.  I love the idea of Weebly offering a checklist so that even for a novice, the process is easy to understand.  My only complaint is that the checklist was too far down the screen in the right hand column which at first made it hard to notice.

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Creating A Website and Picking A Theme

Once you’ve created your account, you will need to click the ‘Add a site’ button which will then ask you to choose a domain option. You can either create a sub-domain (i.e. yoursite.weebly.com), use an existing domain or buy a domain through Weebly. Weebly offers domains for sale that you can buy through your account; however, the domains cost around $39 which is on the pricey side for a domain. You can get domains through Godaddy for $12. If you get a ‘third party’ domain through a company like Godaddy, just point the name servers to your Weebly account and choose the ‘use an existing’ domain option.

Setup Weebly Site

Watch the quick video to see how easy it is to setup your first weebly website! From registering your website to picking a theme, it’s all very easy.
Watch more Weebly video tutorials

Elegant Design

Weebly is known for it’s simple design which makes it really easy for users to navigate through.  Some might say it’s the simple design coupled with the ease of use that makes Weebly such a popular website builder.  As a designer, I personally love working with burnt orange and blue in a website’s color theme. It’s very fitting for a tech company and to me suggests ease of use.

Weebly Dashboard

Weebly’s Robust Functionality

The functionality of the backend interface may seem limited at first glance because of its simplicity, but don’t let that fool you. You can add html code through Weebly’s embed code widget, add video, text, pictures, poll’s, map’s and custom forms. The widgets are organized into modules in the left column which can be easily dragged into your theme. As you drag a module over to your theme, you will notice specific areas light up with a thick colored border which indicates that it’s a position where you can add the module.

Each Weebly theme is designed with placeholders that can hold modules. The themes are designed this way to keep the aliment of text and graphics well aligned with the layout so that your website doesn’t end up looking messy. Too often I see websites that have poorly written CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that cause texts and images on the site to look misaligned and out of place. Weebly helps you with that by creating these dockable placeholders within your theme. You can even see what your changes look like in real time because as you add modules, the theme updates along with your added changes.

Drag and drop modules from your module menu into your Weebly theme

Easy to use drag and drop capabilities are turning more business owners away from CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal and toward an easy to manage website builder solution like Weebly!

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SEO and Marketing

For a website builder, the markup and code is really clean. There is not an overwhelming usage of javascript and jquery in the source code that you would see with a website builder like Wix. One drawback with adding images is that you can’t add alt tags to your images. Alt tags help Google better understand what the image is all about. The font stylesheets appear to be imported in from Google which could be good or bad. Google has fast servers which is good, but if your site has too many external references, it can slow down your website. All in all, the Weebly code looks straight forward and clean.

Upselling and Feature Restrictions

If you’re using a free subdomain of weebly, then you will see a popup message asking you to buy a domain every time you publish your website. This is annoying, but lets face it, you shouldn’t be using a subdomain of Weebly anyways unless of course you are just taking Weebly’s free account for a test drive. Other than that, there isn’t any other annoying upselling popups that you have to worry about. If you want to use a feature like adding a favicon or using the ecommerce shop part of Weebly, then you will see a message that you need to upgrade to use that feature unless of course you have adequate permissions through your current membership level.
Upgrade your Weebly account to Starter, Pro or Business
Weebly Starter Plan Features

  • Add a favicon.
  • Remove Weebly link and branding
  • Customizable footer.
  • Premium support.
  • Expanded stats.
  • Connect your own domain.
  • Add unlimited pages.

Weebly Pro Features

  • Add a header slideshow.
  • Add and manage HD Video and audio players.
  • Password protect your website pages.
  • Add a search box to allow visitors to search your website.

Weebly Business Features

  • Add a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to protect your website from hackers.
  • Membership website, allow your visitors to log into your website to see hidden content such as videos or articles.
    • Allow your visitors to register on your website and become members.
    • Sell products and services through your website.
    • Manage your inventory.
    • Tax and shipping calculator.
    • Add and manage coupon codes.

All three membership level options: Starter, Pro and Business come with a $100 Google Adwords credit.

Mobile Compatibility

With mobile users increasing every day, it’s more important now than ever for your website to be mobile compatible. Weebly offers completely responsive mobile friendly themes which means that your site will look good on devices such as iPad, iPhone, Android and tablets.

A little more about website mobile compatibility and which types of business should really care.

According to Smart Insights mobile marketing statistics of 2015, mobile internet users have now passed desktop users back in 2014 and continue to take up more market share. But it’s important to consider who your target audience is. Are you B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Consumer)? If you’re selling to other businesses, then I would argue that most of your website visitors will come from desktops as that is the preferred device at the workplace; however, if you’re selling to consumers (i.e. local bakery) then I would argue that most of your website visitors would come from mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones.

In conclusion

Weebly offers better looking themes, an easier UI (user interface) and offers the lowest priced website builder in the market. Which is incredible, because when you get the best, you usually expect to pay more, not less? I would love to hear your thoughts and experience using the website builder Weebly in the comments section below .

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Jimdo Review

Probably one of the easiest website builders to work with other than Weebly is Jimdo.  Aside from the absence of the drag and drop technology that Weebly offers, Jimdo is very similar. One really nice feature that Jimdo has is the ability to move the position of the placeholders up or down on the page. Another really useful feature is the ability to add multilingual pages. So if you have a business that attracts customers who speak a different language, you can offer a page that translates your website text into the language of your choosing.

Overall, Yola has some really good features and is perfect for the small business owner who wants a really easy to use website builder solution.

Sign Up

The sign up process was really straight forward and took less than 30 seconds much like the other site builders like Weebly and Shopify.  The first step required me to create an account by providing my email, name and a password. The second step and final step provided me with a catalog of templates. The template selection was limited to around 15 templates per type of website (i.e. bussiness, store, personal, portfolio).  I was expecting to see more templates then what was provided, but the templates that were provided seem to be very well designed. And if you can’t find a good template through Jimdo, try checking out Matrix Themes Jimdo’s template selection. There are actually a few third party websites like Matrix Themes who offer premium themes for Jimdo.

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Design and UI (User Interface)

After creating my account I started to get familar with Jimdo’s UI. The UI has a Weebly feel to it and is really easy to use, but instead of drag and drop, you need to click on the placeholder and then you will be provided options to add modules to. The placeholder’s can be mounevered around the web page by clicking up and down arrows. This is a great option for people who don’t want to have to worry about alignment issues within the content of their website.  Many websites look different on different devices and browsers because either the CSS was not carefully written, conflicting style rules, or perhaps the designer didn’t write responsive styles for different sized devices. Whatever the reason, Jimdo seems to have taken care of that problem by offering placeholders with a lot of restrictions.

If you’re looking for the freedom to move images, texts and video around your page freely without any restrictions, then Jimdo is not a good choice for you. But not a lot of people need this sort of freedom of design, many people just want a website that looks professional and that means looking good on all devices and browsers. I can’t tell you how important continuity when it comes to website design.

Jimdo example website with green evolution theme

Jimdo’s Multilingual Support

Known for it’s multilingual support and mobile compatibility, Jimdo is a great solution for a simple website that need to offer it’s text in different languages.

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Jimdo Apps

It surprised me to see dropbox as an app that Jimdo offers. Dropbox is a great tool to share large files. I’m not sure that it gets used a lot on typical websites like mom and pa shops (i.e. salons, bakeries, coffee shops, boutiques, etc), but I could see it’s useful applications in a membership style website. Other apps include: QR codes, Twitter and Google Analytics.

Jimdo's settings include dropbox, qr codes, google analytics and twitter

Features and Restrictions

There are a lot of features offered by Jimdo that other website builders like Weebly charge for. For example, you must have a pro account with Weebly which is a paid membership level to be able to add a favicon or password protect a page, whereas, with Jimdo, it’s free. Jimdo has 3 membership options: free account, pro account and business account. The pro account is $90 per year and the business account is $240 per year. The free account only seems to be restricted from the SEO tools and statistics of your website.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

In order to take advantage of Jimdo’s SEO tools, you will need to upgrade your account from a free account to a Pro or Business account. Then you will be allowed to add meta tags such as keywords, page descriptions and page titles to your pages which will improve your SERP rankings.

Mobile Compatibility

Jimdo is known for it’s highly responsive templates and if you can’t find a template in their offered catalog, Jimdo supports third party templates built using the Jimdo framework.

In Conclusion

Jimdo seems to be built for the small business owner who needs an easy to use and website builder solution.  The placeholders limit you in how you can place images and text around your page, but for many people, this can be helpful because the elements on your page will always be aligned with each and the layout of your website will look great on all devices. All in all, I would recommend Jimdo. It’s a solid website builder with what appears to be a strong community of designers and developers.

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Ecommerce Wesbites

An ecommerce website is a type of website that sells goods or services online through it’s webpages. There are a few things that you should have on your ecommerce website:

  1. SSL Certificate which stands for Secure Sockets Layer.
    1. An SSL will encrypt the data sent from your website to your merchant processor so that hacker can’t intercept the information. Typically companies such as godaddy will sell 128 bit and 256 bit encrypted SSL’s.  As you can imagine, the 256 bit encryption SSL is more secure.
    2. An SSL can be installed by your webhosting company for a fee or if you are experienced enough, you can install it.
    3. Once your SSL is installed, you will be able to access https://… without seeing a 404 page.  You should also be able to see a little lock next to your URL in your browser.
  2. Shopping Cart
    1. The first thing you should consider when you are thinking about a shopping cart is, what kind of website do you have? Do you have a CMS website such as wordpress, joomla or drupal? If so, there are a lot of plugins that you could use that will make setting up your shopping cart a breeze.