uKit is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop web site builder from Moscow-based Ucoz Media, the corporate behind the extra developer-oriented uCoz CMS.
The service delivers all of the core options you’d count on from a WYSIWYG web site builder, together with responsive templates, drag-and-drop content material sections and web page parts, a running a blog system, internet retailer and integration with a scattering of internet apps and providers (Ecwid, MailChimp, LiveChat, LiveAgent, SlideShare and extra.)
These options do not all the time have the ability you will see elsewhere, and as an illustration the weblog and internet retailer are extra appropriate for novices and residential customers than demanding companies. However uKit acknowledges this in its low costs, which supply some actual worth.
uKit’s Premium plan, as an illustration (overlook the title, it is essentially the most primary within the vary), provides you limitless pages, disk house and bandwidth, and permits constructing a number of web sites. It would not have uKit branding or every other main catches, but prices from simply $three.50 (£2.69) a month on a two-year plan, $four should you pay yearly.
The Premium+ plan provides stay chat help, entry to a industrial library of Premium templates and help for Targets in Google Analytics, and is priced from $7.00 (£three.08) a month.
The eCommerce plan provides uKit’s internet retailer, with costs beginning at a really low $eight.40 (£6.46) a month.
uKit’s top-of-the-range Professional product contains the power to design your personal shade schemes, and use customized HTML, a extra primary characteristic which ideally we might prefer to see included in all plans. Nonetheless, because it’s priced from $10.50 (£eight.08) a month, many customers might need to skip the extra primary plans and join Professional instantly.
For comparability, essentially the most primary Wix Join Area plan contains Wix adverts and limits you to 1GB bandwidth, but prices a comparatively excessive £three ($three.90) a month, whereas signing up for the Wix eCommerce plan lifts the worth to £11 ($14.30). This does get you extra options and a free area for a 12 months, however uKit nonetheless seems to be very competitively priced, and clearly deserves a better look.
Getting began
We’re a bit of uninterested in internet hosts asking for our title, deal with, telephone quantity and who-knows-what-else only for the privilege of signing as much as their service, so it is good to see uKit taking a extra relaxed method. Enter your e-mail deal with, password, and the web site instantly logs you in and kicks off the setup course of. It could not be a lot simpler.
Web site constructing begins by selecting a template. At first look it appears there’s lots to select from, however you then understand a lot of them are close to similar layouts with completely different background images. Nonetheless, there’s sufficient to get by, together with a choice of easy one-page websites, and we had been capable of preview and select a handsome instance inside a few minutes. Should you change your thoughts, later, you may swap to a different template with out dropping your content material.
The setup wizard continued by prompting us for our enterprise title, deal with, e-mail, telephone quantity, Skype title and social media hyperlinks. That is used to robotically populate the assorted Contact fields on every template, however you may skip the step should you’re not .
As soon as the wizard was full, it redirected us to the editor, which advised us our web site was ‘Loading.’ That may have been simply effective, besides the editor was nonetheless saying that 5, ten and fifteen minutes later.
We fired off a message to help (extra on that under), and acquired a suggestion to ‘go incognito or disable all browser extensions (to begin with, adblockers.)’ We do not keep in mind ever reviewing one other internet service which could not work with advert blockers, however this actually did develop into the reply, and disabling our advert blocker for the ukit.com area allowed us to start out modifying.
Editor
The uKit editor has a handsome, clear and easy design which neatly organizes its many instruments and choices in a single left-hand sidebar. Web page administration, aspect constructing, colours, fonts, website backups and extra, are all only a click on or two away.
The majority of the display is used to preview the present web page. Hovering your mouse over a web page ingredient shows a mini-toolbar telling you what it’s, and itemizing actions you may carry out on it, and left-clicking an merchandise tells you extra.
uKit pages are constructed from content material blocks in addition to particular person web page parts, so exploring the assorted toolbars reveals loads of choices. You’ll be able to edit and reformat textual content, change photos, change background photos, alter block layouts, duplicate a block, copy it to a different web page, and extra.
You’ll be able to drag and drop most web page parts inside a block, however these can solely be moved to accredited positions (to the left of 1 object, above or under one other.) Nonetheless, it provides you some flexibility, and the editor does an honest job of displaying you the place these drop factors will be.
The present web page is initially displayed in its desktop format, however you may swap to pill or cell views in a click on or two. Web page blocks will be selectively hidden within the present view, and some choices are view-specific. You’ll be able to set a posh high-res background for the desktop, as an illustration, however use one thing smaller and easier for mobiles, hopefully dashing up load instances.
Supported web page widgets cowl all of the fundamentals, together with textual content, photos, galleries, sliders, movies, maps, varieties and social media buttons.
uKit will get extra fascinating with its Content material widgets. A few of these are extra superior particular person web page parts (tables, a timer, a Google search field to go looking your website), whereas others mix primary widgets in helpful methods to supply timelines, evaluations, characteristic lists, website information and extra.
Whereas uKit cannot start to match with the extensibility of Wix, you do get integration with a number of different internet providers and apps, together with AddThis, uCalc, SlideShare, Ecwid, MailChimp, LiveChat and JivoChat. You could possibly add extra by inserting some customized HTML, however that is solely obtainable within the Professional plan.
We accomplished our shopping on the Web page Administration display, which additionally impressed us with its considerate design and a focus to element. This is not nearly itemizing the present website pages and including extra; it’s also possible to rearrange pages, duplicate them, change their titles or Title, Description and Key phrases meta tags.
Even higher, you are capable of create and handle pop-up home windows and system pages (‘404 not discovered’, Privateness Coverage, Person Settlement), all from the identical part.
uKit would not excel in each space. There isn’t any right-click or keyboard shortcut help throughout the editor, as an illustration, and uKit’s widgets aren’t as quite a few or configurable as you will see with Wix or Weebly. However there’s nonetheless a variety of energy right here, effectively offered and simple to make use of, and total the editor will get a thumbs up from us.
Media
uKit’s media dealing with options start with its serviceable Picture widget. It isn’t essentially the most superior we have seen – there isn’t any built-in editor, as an illustration – nevertheless it covers the fundamentals with help for zooming, cropping and captions, and left-click actions to show the picture full-screen or observe a customized hyperlink.
You are capable of add photos out of your native system, or seize them from any URL. Integration with depositphotos permits shopping for high quality inventory images, and in an uncommon contact, you are capable of import photos from Fb and the Russian social networking website VK.
A sensible Gallery widget permits displaying a number of photos in a grid, collage or slideshow, with captions optionally displayed below the picture or when your mouse hovers over it. There isn’t any simple approach to handle your photos as soon as they’re arrange, so as an illustration, you may’t drag and drop to rearrange them, however typically it performs effectively.
A really configurable Slider supplies an expert approach to show your photos, and permits you to tweak overlays, navigation strategies, animations and extra.
The Video widget additionally supplies extra performance than typical. It helps video hyperlinks from YouTube, Vimeo and Fb, and permits you to management autoplay, enjoying of ‘associated movies’, and the show of participant controls, the video title and extra.
Audio integration is way more primary, with uKit offering a easy approach to embed the SoundCloud observe participant solely.
The flexibility to connect with LinkedIn’s SlideShare is extra uncommon and fascinating, supplying you with the power to show shows, paperwork, PDFs, movies and extra.
It is also good to see a customized File choice. Drag and drop this onto a web page and also you get a Obtain button with the title of your file, an outline and (optionally) file dimension, and you may have the file merely obtain, open within the present or a brand new browser window. It isn’t excellent, so as an illustration you may’t configure a single widget to deal with a number of information (you may add a number of widgets, however then have format restrictions), nevertheless it’s ok for easy functions, and greater than you will get with many opponents.
Weblog and e-commerce
It is easy to overlook uKit’s running a blog platform, principally as a result of they’ve chosen to explain it as a ‘Information’ web page fairly than a weblog. However ultimately we figured it out, and had been able to create our first put up.
The weblog will get off to a poor begin with its primary editor, which restricts put up content material to textual content, photos and movies. You’ll be able to’t assign tags or classes to a put up to assist guests discover the content material they want, and you may’t give a put up a customized URL.
There are additionally some pluses, together with YaShare and AddThis integration for social media sharing, feedback help through Disqus, and the power to schedule posts to be revealed robotically.
Essentially the most fascinating characteristic is the weblog’s potential to import as much as 50 posts out of your Fb web page. You could possibly, in principle, use the import characteristic to seize content material from Fb, and by no means create any posts in uKit in any respect. Which may be very handy for some folks, however as a pure running a blog platform, uKit could be very underpowered.
The net retailer can be very a lot basics-only, as an illustration with funds solely lined by PayPal and the costly Pockets One, nevertheless it’s onerous to count on extra at these low costs, and in case your wants are easy, uKit may very well be ok.
Help
Whereas UKit’s editor is polished and intelligently-designed, the net assist system looks like extra of an afterthought. There isn’t any clear Assist hyperlink from throughout the editor, and though there is a Assist choice within the dashboard, even that solely provides you one other hyperlink to an internet FAQ.
We clicked the FAQ hyperlink anyway, and had been directed to a Russian language model. It is onerous to inform precisely what is going on on behind the scenes, however plainly uKit is utilizing easy static hyperlinks, fairly than listening to the person’s location and present language. In that case, that is amateurish and unprofessional, particularly as, if uKit had executed the slightest testing, it will be very simple to identify.
Fortuitously, the Russian support page makes it fairly simple to identify the issue, and as soon as we realized English support page did not work, both, we discovered that the support page without a language option lastly bought us to an English-language model.
Whether or not it was price all this effort is open to query. There are some good articles, however not practically sufficient. Those you get aren’t all the time sensibly organized or titled, making it troublesome to seek out the solutions you want. And though we had reached the English-language model of the FAQ, the localization points hadn’t completely disappeared, with as an illustration the search engine displaying a Russian error message if we entered a key phrase which wasn’t discovered.
If the web site would not have the knowledge you want, reaching out to the help crew ought to get you a solution. It took us some time to learn the way to do that, as oddly it is hidden behind a ‘Suggestions’ menu merchandise, however ultimately we figured it out and fired off a query. This time there have been no issues, language or in any other case, and inside an hour a pleasant and useful reply arrived telling us every little thing we would have liked to know.
uKit nonetheless has loads of work to do on its help, then, however, total, there ought to be sufficient that can assist you address most conditions, particularly should you get the stay chat help obtainable with the Premium+ plan.
Ultimate verdict
Nice in some areas, weak in others, uKit is troublesome to attain. Nonetheless, should you’re in search of a website-building discount, it is most likely price a glance.