1&1 MyWebsite is a drag-and-drop web site builder from German internet hosting big 1&1 Web.

MyWebsite’s Starter plan covers the fundamentals for private websites. You get limitless pages and net area, a easy built-in weblog, restricted web optimization settings and web site backup and restore. It is priced at £2.99 ($three.75) a month for yr one, £6.99 ($eight.75) after that, maybe a little bit costly for what you get.

The extra succesful Primary plan provides you extra templates, a free area, e mail tackle and an SSL certificates. You are in a position so as to add some business-type options to your web site, together with buyer opinions and appointment scheduling. Extras embody entry to MyWebsite’s inventory picture library (you get 5 photos without cost) and help for utilizing a number of languages throughout the web site. The plan is £zero.99 ($1.25) a month for yr one, £9.99 ($12.50) a month after that.

The Plus plan permits customizing web site content material primarily based on the customer’s location, time, gadget, the variety of instances they’ve visited your web site, and extra. On-line advertising and marketing options embody web optimization evaluation of the location, and help to your personal e-newsletter. The worth leaps as much as £9.99 ($12.50) a month for yr one, and a chunky £19.99 ($25) afterwards. That appears costly when some builders provides comparable merchandise and throw in respectable e-commerce instruments for a cheaper price.

MyWebsite used to have a Premium plan which added an internet retailer, however that was just lately dropped. Fortuitously, the corporate has a separate 1&1 eShop range (extra on these under). There’s comparable template-based web site creation, and costs begin at £9.99 ($12.50) a month in yr one, £14.99 ($18.75) subsequently.

All purchases are protected by a 30-day money-back assure. This has the same old limits you get with any internet hosting firm – you are not lined for objects like new area registrations, and you’ll’t get a refund in case you’ve had one from 1&1 earlier than – but when these aren’t a difficulty for you, the assure provides you loads of time to search out out what the service can do.

Getting began

You begin off with 1&1 MyWebsite by selecting your free area. You’ll be able to skip this step in case you’re unsure but or personal the area already, and work on the location utilizing a brief URL as a substitute.

There is not any free trial, and 1&1 asks you to pay for the service upfront. However the preferred Primary plan solely prices you £zero.99 billed month-to-month for yr one, so there’s not a lot in the way in which of economic threat or ache.

We handed over our money through PayPal (playing cards are supported, too), and 1&1 offered us with a type demanding our contact particulars: full identify, tackle and telephone quantity, with firm identify and kind for enterprise customers. We submitted our data, and inside just a few seconds MyWebsite’s setup wizard appeared.

At its easiest, you may enter the identify and kind of web site (music, pictures, know-how, one thing else), then select to create an On-line Enterprise Card. That is basically a ‘Contact us’ web page with a reputation, a little bit textual content and a few contact particulars. It could be sufficient to get began, and you’ll have it on-line inside minutes.

For those who want one thing extra, you are in a position to select from a variety of responsive templates. These are grouped by subjects or you may search the gathering by key phrase, and most of our take a look at searches returned loads of handsome designs.

Click on a template thumbnail and also you’re capable of view a bigger picture, though sadly, there is no choice to preview the template as an lively web site in your browser. You’ll be able to’t swap templates later until you wipe every part and begin once more, so it is essential to decide on fastidiously.

Editor

The MyWebsite editor has a really acquainted feel and appear. A preview of your web site allows clicking and enhancing photos, textual content and extra. A left-hand toolbar permits including content material, altering format choices and customizing site-level settings. And the menu bar contains choices to decide on the web page, set a view kind (desktop, pill, cellular), undo the present motion, preview the location and publish it if you’re completed.

We moved our mouse cursor across the web page and located simply hovering over an object confirmed a rectangle defining its dimension, gave us handles indicating the place and the way we might transfer and resize it, and displayed a delete button to take away the article completely. That is much more visible suggestions than you may get with many editors, which frequently provide you with no clue whether or not it is attainable to maneuver or resize objects in any respect.

Proper-clicking a picture gave us a well-designed context-sensitive menu. This included normal choices to exchange the picture, customise its format, change alignment or copy the picture to the clipboard. We had been capable of selectively cover the article on desktops, tablets or cellular gadgets, a massively highly effective characteristic. Specialists may even edit the article HTML and CSS, giving detailed low-level management over performance.

Much less skilled customers should not really feel omitted. Left-clicking the picture displayed a easy however feature-packed dialog with buttons to exchange the image, edit it, add or take away hyperlinks, change the format, fashion (borders, shadows, rounded corners) and add a spread of hover results.

These dialogs do a wonderful job of mixing plenty of options in a small area, however with out intimidating novice customers. The Picture management alone has two sections, one with three tabs – approaching 20 perform areas in whole – but more often than not you are viewing solely three or 4. MyWebsite’s energy is just ever a click on or two away, however you will not run into any actual complexities until you go on the lookout for them.

The Widgets sidebar permits including all types of content material and instruments to your pages. Normal choices embody textual content, photos, buttons and kinds. You’ll be able to embed maps, audio and video information and a bunch of social content material: Share buttons, Twitter feeds, Fb and Disqus feedback, Scribd paperwork and extra.

MyWebsite additionally provides many extra superior apps and integrations, together with Google Translate, Click on to Name buttons, OpenTable-based restaurant reservations, a e-newsletter service, on-line scheduling, PollDaddy surveys and your organization’s TripAdvisor opinions.

World web site settings go nicely past what we normally see. You are capable of set a favicon, social community and iOS dwelling display icon, or add customized HTML and JavaScript to web page headers. It’s additionally attainable to allow cookie notification messages, set a customized 404 error web page that customers will see in the event that they go to an invalid URL, and even arrange redirects from outdated URLs to their new dwelling – an essential possibility with normal internet hosting which is routinely ignored by most web site builders.

Better of all, your additions, adjustments and tweaks are nicely protected by an clever autosave characteristic and a world Undo. Tapping Undo all the time reversed our earlier steps, and even when we took some drastic steps – dragged and dropped a brand new management, then closed the window instantly – the editor was sensible sufficient to save lots of our web site and restore it later.

Media

MyWebsite’s media help covers a good vary of file varieties, with widgets for embedding photos, sliders, galleries, movies, SoundCloud content material and paperwork (through Scribd). They’re largely very configurable, too.

The Picture widget features a small inventory photograph library and offers you 5 top-quality premium photos, as an illustration. A robust built-in editor permits for cropping, resizing and rotating photos, making use of results and overlays, tweaking colours and lighting, making use of splash results, fixing red-eye, eradicating blemishes and extra. Whenever you’re achieved, MyWebsite may apply customized hover results for at any time when the mouse cursor strikes over the picture (zooms, blurs, opacity and extra).

MyWebsite’s Photograph Gallery has 10 pattern layouts to show photos in grids, rows, columns, mosaics and extra. There’s pixel-level management over spacing and plenty of choices for outlining textual content, frames and colours. The Picture Slider is equally highly effective.

The Video and SoundCloud widgets are extra typical. You’ll be able to embed movies from YouTube and Vimeo, for instance, and set the participant width, however little extra.

The Scribd widget is a welcome further which permits accessing paperwork posted in Scribd through your web site. There aren’t many choices as a result of Scribd’s viewer is doing a lot of the work, however we’re completely happy that the characteristic is obtainable.

MyWebsite’s Content material Library is a central level for managing your web site content material, together with photos, paperwork and anything that you should reuse in your web site with out having to add it each time. Many builders have one thing comparable for importing new media, however MyWebsite takes the concept to the subsequent stage by discovering and importing information out of your earlier web site, too.

The method could not be a lot simpler. Faucet the Import Content material button, give MyWebsite a URL and it searches it for photos, downloads, and phone particulars like your telephone quantity, bodily tackle and social media hyperlinks.

The outcomes had been spectacular. In a single click on we might routinely set all the small print on our new web site to match the imported information. There was no want so as to add our personal tackle to the Fb URL, as an illustration – MyWebsite might handle this all by itself.

MyWebsite imported all the pictures it discovered on our unique web site and Fb account, too. These had been instantly obtainable within the Content material Library, and we might reuse them in our MyWebsite picture, gallery and slider controls with a few clicks.

This characteristic will not work for everybody, and in case you needn’t reuse earlier media, it will not matter anyway. However it’s a welcome signal of 1&1’s ambition, and its means to ship options you will not discover anyplace else.

Running a blog

MyWebsite comes with a easy running a blog platform which may be added to your web site in seconds. Unusually, this does not pressure you to start out with a clean template. If in case you have an present weblog, level MyWebsite at its RSS feed and it may possibly import your posts, photos and Disqus feedback, perfect for guaranteeing a easy migration out of your earlier host.

Skip the import step and MyWebsite generates a few generic posts instead. These provide help to see and take a look at how the system works, though skilled customers can merely delete them and begin from scratch.

New posts are created in a particular full-screen editor, quite than instantly on the web page. That is a lot less complicated than the common MyWebsite editor, solely permitting a really small variety of formatting choices and widgets (textual content, picture, heading, video, divider and customized HTML). If you wish to add a photograph gallery, as an illustration – hardly an unlikely scenario – you may be out of luck.

Settings and posting choices are additionally restricted. You’ll be able to add tags to a submit, however it’s not attainable to prepare posts into classes, and there is no solution to schedule a submit to be printed on a selected date.

Total, the weblog may be very straightforward to arrange and use, and the import characteristic may very well be a significant spotlight, however the core engine in all probability will not be highly effective sufficient for demanding customers.

E-commerce

The 1&1 MyWebsite vary now not helps an internet retailer, however the firm does have a succesful choice of e-commerce plans that you could strive as a substitute.

1&1 eShop Particular comes with loads of retailer templates and helps limitless merchandise. The key restrict is you are solely in a position to make use of three cost strategies: invoices, direct debits and PayPal Specific Checkout. It is priced at £9.99 ($12.50) a month in yr one, £14.99 ($18.75) afterwards.

1&1 eShop Enterprise provides help for a number of cost strategies (bank cards, Stripe, Sage Pay, Amazon Pay, and extra), built-in delivery help, advertising and marketing instruments and the power to achieve some comparability web sites (Idealo, Google Procuring, Procuring.com). It is yours for £19.99 ($25) a month for the primary yr, £29.99 ($37.50) a month after that.

1&1 eShop Premium goes additional by permitting you to hook up with your accounts on eBay and Amazon Market. It is a welcome and weird plus level, however comes at a price: £29.99 ($37.50) a month in yr one, £49.99 ($62.50) a month after that.

We did not overview these merchandise as they don’t seem to be part of the MyWebsite vary, however yow will discover out extra about them on the 1&1 site.

Assist

MyWebsite help begins throughout the editor. Click on any object, and the dialog field that seems may have a assist icon. Faucet that and a floating window pops up with details about your choices. It is all very handy, and the articles have loads of helpful particulars.

A normal Assist button opens the full Support site in a separate browser tab.

Looking the 1&1 knowledgebase did not return many articles, however there have been sufficient to cowl the core factors. Once we searched on the key phrase ‘video’, as an illustration, the location pointed us to articles on methods to embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo, methods to embody a video in a weblog, and methods to set a video background.

The article high quality was nicely above common, too. This wasn’t only a case of ‘paste the video URL right here’; they defined different points, provided troubleshooting recommendation and associated ideas.

For those who nonetheless cannot discover the reply you want, 1&1 additionally provides 24/7 telephone help. It may be busy however we had been capable of get related inside a couple of minutes, a much better response time than provided by many web site builders.

Ultimate verdict

It is a little bit costlier than some, however MyWebsite’s interesting templates, well-designed editor and highly effective bonus options allow anybody to construct feature-packed web sites.