It might boast probably the greatest domains within the enterprise, however the SiteBuilder.com web site has little to say about its personal service.
You get a couple of generic traces about ‘lots of of customizable templates’, a drag-and-drop editor, built-in running a blog, e-commerce and analytics, however that is about it. Thankfully, the Pricing web page has a bit extra data.
The product vary begins with the free Starter plan. This will get you the core editor and full set of customizable templates, however your web site will embrace SiteBuilder branding and is restricted to 50MB.
The Professional plan drops the advertisements, raises your space for storing to 5GB, and features a free area title, web site statistics, advert credit and precedence help. It appears costly at round £four.61 ($5.75) a month for yr one, £9.22 ($11.50) afterwards. You will get equally specified plans for round £5 a month as a normal worth.
The Premium plan provides you 10GB of area and provides premium help, apparently, though it does not clearly outline what that entails. It is priced at £6.14 ($7.70) a month for yr one, £12.29 ($15.35) after that.
The eCommerce plan throws in an internet retailer for an preliminary £9.99 ($12.50), rising to £19.99 ($25) after yr one.
A barely worrying money-back assure states that you simply ‘could’ get a refund (excluding any area registration) if you happen to cancel inside the first 14 days of service. The usage of the phrase ‘could’ implies there’s a chance of ‘could not’, however because the coverage does not clarify any excluding situations, there is not any option to decide how beneficiant (or harsh) it is perhaps.
Getting began
Signing up with SiteBuilder is fast and straightforward. There aren’t any bank card particulars required upfront, and all you must do is present your title and e-mail handle, or enroll straight utilizing your Google or Fb accounts.
After clicking a hyperlink to confirm our e-mail handle, we logged into SiteBuilder’s administration console and started searching templates. These are organized by class, and there are lots to select from: the Life-style part had 80 templates, Images had 23, Computer systems and Expertise gave us 27 choices, even Building and Commerce supplied a really cheap 16.
All templates had been initially displayed utilizing massive thumbnails, however may be previewed full-screen, and in each desktop and cellular kinds – a useful contact that many companies ignore.
Choose a template and it opens within the SiteBuilder editor. This has extra seen sections, choices and controls than a number of the competitors – the menu and web page selector top-left, toolbar top-right, sidebar for varied enhancing duties – however there’s nothing too intimidating or sophisticated, and a gap tutorial explains the fundamentals in beneath a minute.
Begin to discover, and you will find SiteBuilder works a lot as you’d anticipate. Scroll the preview web page, click on on an object to see how one can edit it, then make some tweaks and preview the outcomes. No matter your web site builder expertise, you will quickly really feel at house.
Editor
SiteBuilder’s editor gives a stunning variety of methods to customise most website objects. Click on in a textual content field, for example, and you are not simply in a position to edit, fashion or align the textual content. You possibly can change the colour of the field, change its border width and radius, add drop shadow or glow results, make low-level font modifications to letter and line spacing, and even apply a number of textual content animation results (fades, flips, bounces, shakes, fly-ins and extra).
That is not all. SiteBuilder pages are constructed from sections, and if you happen to click on the area round a header (or a picture, or a gallery, or every other part component) you will discover many extra customization choices.
A few of the settings reproduce what you are able to do with a component, however on the part stage. So reasonably than have animated textual content fly into a hard and fast textual content field, you might have the textual content field itself fly onto the web page.
Different settings are extra advanced. Including behaviors permits objects to manage different capabilities, maybe enjoying or stopping a video, submitting a kind or navigating across the website. And attention-grabbing site-level choices embrace the power to point out a bit on all net pages with a click on.
There’s numerous energy right here, but it surely does come on the expense of some on-screen litter. Simply hovering your mouse over a bit is sufficient for the editor to show one section-level toolbar, and left-clicking shows the total part toolbox.
SiteBuilder’s sections are nonetheless a good suggestion, not least as a result of they offer you so many choices. There are headers, footers, photographs, textual content containers, galleries, and prebuilt blocks like function lists, schedules, kinds and extra. Every of those is available in a variety of codecs and kinds, with the editor displaying previews of every thing that can assist you perceive what you are going to get.
Select the Video part, for example, and you do not simply get a body the place you’ll be able to embed a film. SiteBuilder can show single movies with backgrounds, a number of movies in rows or columns, video partitions in mosaic patterns, and a few of these with captions, others with out.
Not like comparable companies, these sections are extraordinarily customizable, even after including them to your website. For instance, after inserting a 2 x 2 video wall we had been in a position to drop one of many movies, show the remaining in column or row order, or change the design to match any of the opposite video sections.
Though to date we have been speaking about sections, you can too take the extra typical method of constructing your website from particular person objects. Clicking the Add Component button means that you can add textual content containers, photographs, social media content material (Twitter, Fb, Google+), music, movies, maps, paperwork and extra.
You need to use these parts alone, or show them inside sections, and every thing might be positioned with pixel precision. Objects do not soar round in accordance with some mysterious guidelines which solely the editor understands – they keep wherever you drop them.
No matter you are doing, the editor does its finest to be useful. Proper-click help provides you context-sensitive menus with helpful choices, together with the power to repeat parts and paste them elsewhere. The editor understands the usual keyboard shortcuts for reduce, copy, paste, delete and extra, and there is an Undo button to rapidly get better from any main errors.
Media
SiteBuilder has solely the naked minimal of media help: you’ll be able to add photographs, embed YouTube and Vimeo clips or play SoundCloud content material, however that is about it for the native instruments. Even these are comparatively fundamental. You possibly can show photographs or have them pop up in full-sized kind when clicked, however there aren’t any fancy gentle field controls, sliders or the rest.
The service has some plus factors. Integration with the Unsplash.com inventory photograph library is a specific spotlight. We tried working searches utilizing varied not-so-common key phrases, however even examples like Squirrel, Tarmac and Headlight returned a lot of related photographs, all free to make use of instantly.
There is a highly effective built-in photograph editor, too, with extra performance than some standalone apps. It might crop, rotate or resize your photographs, alter brightness and distinction, tweak colours and tone, take away blemishes, repair red-eye and whiten enamel, add captions, frames, overlays and stickers. It’s additionally able to tweaking sharpness or making use of focus results, and means that you can draw freehand on the picture, create vignettes, paint a customized colour splash impact, and extra.
SiteBuilder additionally helps making a hosted My Pictures gallery. Add your most commonly-required photographs they usually’ll at all times be accessible for future use, with out having to add them once more.
In case you’re making a easy web site and solely want a couple of static photographs, SiteBuilder’s inventory photographs and media library could attraction. However extra demanding customers can be annoyed by SiteBuilder’s lack of energy, and general the service does not get near the media dealing with talents of Wix or Weebly.
Running a blog
Most SiteBuilder templates do not embrace a weblog, in contrast to many opponents, but it surely’s straightforward so as to add one later from the principle editor sidebar.
Unusually, SiteBuilder gives you a alternative of weblog templates, every with their very own format and magnificence. These had been largely very flashy, with photograph headings and high-res photographs in every single place, which can be a problem if you happen to’re on the lookout for one thing extra plain and business-like. However there is not any doubt the templates look good, and most customers will most likely discover a fashion that appeals.
As soon as you have created a weblog, it seems as a brand new web page within the SiteBuilder editor, and might be custom-made like every other. In case you do not just like the default photograph backgrounds then you’ll be able to change them with one thing less complicated, and you’ll add new textual content to inform readers about your self and what the weblog is for.
New posts are created in a particular full-screen editor. This solely permits use of essentially the most fundamental content material parts – headings, textual content, photographs, movies and contours – which might show restrictive. It is not tough to think about the way you would possibly wish to embed a map, say, or a tweet.
Posting choices are additionally restricted, with a couple of exceptions.
It is good to see you’ll be able to pin a number of posts to the highest of the weblog, one thing we have not usually seen elsewhere. RSS feeds are generated by default, and Fb feedback are supported as normal.
However alternatively, you’ll be able to’t schedule posts to be printed on a specific date. There is no help for Disqus feedback, and no standalone feedback system that you already know will work for everybody. And there is nothing like Wix’s potential to publish posts to Fb or ship updates to subscribers.
These aren’t essentially deadly errors, and SiteBuilder might nonetheless be an interesting alternative if you happen to’re on the lookout for a easy weblog with some visible fashion, however energy customers will rapidly be annoyed by its lack of options.
E-commerce
SiteBuilder solely helps an internet retailer with its high-end eCommerce plan, which prices £9.99 ($12.50) a month in yr one, rising to a painful £19.98 ($25) afterwards. Different companies usually offer you a small retailer with their extra fundamental plans, and a few even present fundamental shops without spending a dime.
May SiteBuilder’s shops be so superb that they are value this premium worth, we puzzled?
Nicely, there are some neat touches, like the power to outline reductions, give merchandise a banner to spotlight objects for some cause (they’re new, seasonal, on sale), and an efficient Product Variants system makes it a lot simpler than standard to arrange key product choices (colour, measurement and no matter else you want). Taxes needs to be dealt with robotically for a lot of nations, too, a serious spotlight – though we’re not fairly positive of the total record (apparently it consists of the US, Canada, Australia and “a lot of the European Union”.)
However different areas are missing, so for instance there is not any help for downloading digital merchandise. You possibly can’t outline a product weight, and transport is charged at a flat price relying on the variety of objects (one value for the primary, one other for each further merchandise), no matter these merchandise is perhaps.
Fee supplier help is cheap, with SiteBuillder in a position to deal with not less than PayPal and Stripe, in addition to offering an uncommon ‘money on supply’ possibility. However we might anticipate nothing much less for this worth, and general we’re unconvinced that SiteBuilder provides you adequate to justify the value tag.
Help
SiteBuilder’s help begins at its net Help Centre, the place a searchable knowledgebase goals that can assist you clear any preliminary hurdles.
We scanned the articles for a couple of widespread key phrases, however weren’t impressed by the outcomes. Most articles are very basic, reasonably than being targeted on particular duties, so for example trying to find ‘Video’ returned articles like ‘Design With Components’ or ‘Getting Began With Templates’ reasonably than the targeted recommendation you would possibly want. And trying to find YouTube or Vimeo – the 2 video hosts supported by SiteBuilder – did not get us any outcomes in any respect.
SiteBuilder gives reside chat, so we tried that subsequent. This labored higher than we had been anticipating, with an agent responding to us inside 4 minutes and giving helpful solutions to our product questions.
If that is nonetheless not sufficient, there’s cellphone help accessible, however from a US quantity solely.
We wish to see SiteBuilder enhance its net knowledgebase, though the reside chat and cellphone help are effectively value having, and on stability this wasn’t a nasty efficiency.
Last verdict
SiteBuilder’s large number of templates and versatile editor are able to constructing some high quality websites. The service has vital limits in some areas, although, significantly its media dealing with talents, and general there’s not sufficient energy right here to justify the excessive costs.