As a small business website builder, Webs.com has made waves when it comes to dominating the market and showing companies how to quickly get online.
Webs was eventually bought by VistaPrint, but prior to that transaction, the website building company had a mission to make a system that even their moms could understand.
That's the whole strategy, giving you a good idea as to whether or not it's going to work for you. For example, if you're an advanced developer, Webs may be just fine for you, but chances are you want more of a challenge, and some more advanced functionality.
As for absolute beginners, this is a hot web design solution, considering the pricing is amazing and the themes are pretty nice as well.
Webs.com Review: Overview
Believe it or not- Webs.com is, by far, one of the eldest website builders in the market. The company was founded in 2001 and has since been growing steadily, even after Vistaprint took over.
To put that into perspective, Webs.com has been used to build more than 55 million websites so far. Consequently, it has managed to secure its place among the most dominant builders today.
Although the company serves a wide range of users, its principal target market is online entrepreneurs and small businesses. Now combine that with the whole idea of extreme simplicity that even your mom can understand- and you have yourself one heck of a website builder.
But is it really?
Let’s face the facts for a moment. On one hand, we have millions of website owners who continue to praise Webs.com for its powerful toolset, professionally-designed templates, plus overall convenience in setting up personal and ecommerce websites.
Then of course, on the other hand, we also have a couple of users who apparently consider it to be a bit too simplistic.
Well, let’s find out the truth. This ultimate Webs.com review provides unbiased facts about the primary features and pricing, then it goes ahead to address some of the most popularly asked questions about the website builder.
Webs.com Review: Features
Usability
Interestingly, Webs.com gets you started on the process of building a site as soon as you register. After entering your account credentials, the system essentially prompts you to include details about your site or business.
Webs.com subsequently uses that information to generate a list of themes that would possibly be ideal for the nature of your business. Proceed by choosing a desirable one followed by a suitable pricing plan, then hit the signup button and voila! You’re in.
Now, at this point, one of the things that will strike you about Webs.com is its rather conveniently-designed user interface. The whole layout is neatly structured with only 5 areas- dashboard, builder, theme, pages, and support.
The navigation process itself is extremely straightforward. So, you should be able to grasp the principal functionalities in a minute or two.
Personally, I like the fact that there’s always a preview button at my fingertips. Therefore, I get to view my site’s overall outlook at any time before quickly reverting to the edit mode.
That said, Webs.com offers a framework that should only take you about four steps to get a website up and running.
After registering and logging into the system, the first step basically involves familiarizing yourself with the site builder and its templates. You should then go ahead and customize your website’s theme appropriately as you introduce supplementary pages like contact, services, and about. You could also throw in some apps like calendar, blog or- for online businesses- a web store.
The second step is pretty straightforward- just add content to your website. Start by placing a perfect business or personal logo on your website’s header, and then adjust content sections like maps, forms, plus slideshows. Finally, consider populating all the crucial areas and pages with relevant text, images, and videos.
When you’re done, the subsequent step is all about publishing your site online. And it only takes one click to eventually go live after you’ve come up with a unique domain name.
Then the fourth and final step entails tweaking your entire website to attract traffic accordingly. You can, for instance, take advantage of the SEO booster tool offered by Webs.com. to optimize your pages accordingly. In addition to that, you also get a Stats tool for keeping tabs on your traffic metrics.
Well, that’s pretty much it. You can have yourself a complete website in a couple of minutes. But then again, what web design features do you get on Webs.com website builder?
Web Design and Templates
Webs.com website builder fundamentally uses an approach known as WYSIWYG. In other words, What You See Is What You Get- meaning you get to create the entire website, and the layout you see throughout the whole process is what will eventually be published when the site goes live.
Thankfully, this can be undertaken without any coding skills. As a matter of fact, you don’t need even need to be experienced in web design. Webs.com handles the underlying coding foundation while you, on the other hand, focus on the site’s aesthetics and tools.
Now, as we’ve already discussed, it all starts with template selection. And Webs.com, thankfully, offers quite a number of them. More specifically, you get to choose from an array of more than 450 pre-designed templates covering about 20 different industries.
Sadly, you can’t dive deep into their HTML and CSS for extensive modification. But then again, I guess that would be a redundant feature considering the Webs concept of ultimate simplicity.
Don’t get me wrong though. On the bright side, this website builder comes with several decent customization provisions. Its versatile templates can be tweaked to change their footer, body and navigation bar font styles, background images and colors, plus of course, the accompanying color schemes.
The precise editing options, however, are not constant. They vary as you shift from one template to another.
That said, it’s also worth noting that there are multiple free templates options. But, if you’d prefer a particularly unique site outlook, then I’d advise you to check out the premium templates. They offer the most flexible customization capabilities.
Moving forward, the actual website editor has a refreshingly uncluttered layout. Your site’s theme is positioned at the center of the window, then a dock is placed at the bottom to help you conveniently choose between widgets like PayPal buttons, Like boxes, Facebook comments, Twitter feeds, audio, video, slideshows, photo galleries, table layouts, column layouts, images, text, etc.
The process of adding them to your site and tweaking various sections is pretty laid-back. Just a couple of drags and drops, plus perhaps some selections, and you’ll be done in no time.
All things considered- if you’re looking an extremely powerful editor capable of creating and customizing an extensively dynamic website, then you’ll possibly be disappointed by this specific builder. But, if what you have in mind is a simple and straightforward solution with decent customization features, then you’ll certainly enjoy working with this one.
Ecommerce
More than anything else, I guess ecommerce merchants would mostly be interested in the Web Store tool- which is handy for setting up online stores on Webs.com.
Well, the good thing about it is this- despite its seemingly basic setup, it manages to provide all the critical ecommerce functionalities you’d want in a standard site.
For starters, there are special layouts reserved for online sellers. They’ve been optimized to facilitate well-organized product displays. And in case you’re dealing with a wide range of items, Webs.com offers a powerful search tool to help shoppers conveniently sort through your inventory.
And speaking of which, it’s possible to build a dynamic inventory that showcases an array of varying product options. Web Store allows you to not only add numerous products and categories, but also upload images, as well as specify their corresponding variations like color and size.
When customers start buying, you can rely on Webs.com inventory controls to manage your entire stock. You’ll be able to track the levels and subsequently, restock items when the numbers go down.
Now, when it comes to boosting sales and increasing your store’s overall conversion rate, you might want to leverage the coupon functionalities here. You can even combine that with supplementary price-slashing graphics to achieve a substantially more impactful campaign.
The customers will ultimately pay you via Stripe or PayPal. Admittedly, while these are limited payment options, it turns out they can accept payments globally. In fact, Webs.com even supports multiple global currencies to help you comfortably sell your products internationally.
Webs.com Reviews: Pricing
If you’re thinking about giving Webs.com a try, you can consider starting off on its free package. It just so happens that the website builder is open to free websites, and the main caveat is this- you can only use a Webs.com domain.
Now, when it comes to fully-functional sites with unique domains, Webs.com offers three paid plans. The more you pay, the better the features you get. That said, only the most superior plan comes with online store capabilities.
And here are the details:
Starter-$5.99 per month. Ideal for standard personal sites.
- Email support
- 1GB storage
- Basic statistics
- Mobile website
- Password protected pages
- Webs branding removed
- Unlimited pages
- Custom domain name
Enhanced-$12.99 per month. Ideal for decent business sites.
- Email and live chat support
- 3 custom email addresses
- Premium themes
- 20 web store items
- 5GB storage
- Advanced statistics
- Mobile website
- Password protected pages
- Webs branding removed
- Unlimited pages
- Custom domain name
Pro-$22.99 per month. Ideal for small online stores.
- Email, phone, and live chat support
- SEO Booster
- Search engine submission
- 25 custom email addresses
- Premium themes
- Unlimited web store items
- Unlimited storage
- Advanced statistics
- Mobile website
- Password protected pages
- Webs branding removed
- Unlimited pages
- Custom domain name
FAQ
Who Should Consider Using Webs.com?
After comprehensive analysis and testing, I admit that Webs.com is a fairly decent website builder with online store capabilities. But, here’s the thing- you can only use it for typically small merchant sites. If you want full-blown ecommerce functionalities, you’d be better off with something like Shopify.
Otherwise, the website templates here are quite nice, but they can’t match up to what WordPress.org offers.
So, all in all, I’d say Webs.com has indeed managed to meet its principal objective- to provide an extremely simple website builder for users who are seemingly intimidated by complex systems. Consequently, you should be able to get your business online without spending much.
Comments 0 Responses