Webs.com Review And Tutorial

Topics covered in this review:

- Summary: Overall rating

- Pricing

- Interface

- Design / Themes

- Customer support

- Bonuses and promotion

- Step by Step Tutorial

For a more detailed review and more tips, be sure to visit our

Webs.com Review.

For other website builders reviews, check out our blog

@WBTutorial.com

Webs.com is offering his services since 2001 and today is powering more

than 40 millions websites, collecting more than 300 million page views per month.

The longevity alone tells you why building a website with Webs.com is a good

choice.

Even though a lot of other website builders have entered the market, their

ability to transform complex processes in to easy tasks has kept them in the first

row for all the people who want to make a free website with little or zero

programming skills.

Summary – Overall review

The good things about Weebly:

Drag & Drop – It is very easy to add content because of their drag &drop

builder. Within minutes you can have a page full of great organized content.

No Ads – You don’t have to worry about a clustered website, full of ads or

images that will affect your website’s loading time. There are no forced ads.

Webs.com is Free – You can use their service for free and you get all the

features you need to build a nice looking website. There are a few paid option that

will bring more to the table but if you just want to test it out, go ahead. Everything

is free.

Versatility – They allows you to create whatever kind of website you wish.

Be it a personal blog or a small eCommerce site or even a membership site, Webs

can help do just that.

No Costing Costs – Even though you have some limitations when it comes to

storage space and bandwidth, for a small website they provided everything you

need.

Site Analytics – You can choose both Clicky and Google Analytics to track

your website’s traffic.

Membership Module – Webs.com makes it very easy to start your own

membership like website that will allow you to send bulk emails to all your

members, to manage how certain group of people see the website and so on.

Go Mobile – Your website can be made available with ease to the mobile

devices and this a great feature the days when more and more people are using

mobile devices to surf the internet.

The Cons:

The interface is available only on 2 languages, English and Spanish.

Not the best choice for blog because there is no option to send all the new

comments in to the moderation mode until the admin can clear them. This can be a

nightmare if someone will target your website with spam comments.

Your website is not automatically made in to a mobile version. You have to

use their mobile editor and choose the way you want it to be seen by these kind of

devices. Also there are only a few templates for this and you will end up with one

template for your mobile site and another template for your main website.

Very few templates available comparing to other website builders.

You don’t have the option to edit the HTML/CSS code of the template.

Awards:

- Best for Membership Sites 2013 WBTUTORIAL REWARD

Pricing

You can start using Webs.com services for free and be able to create a good

looking website with all the basic features. But in order to get a taste of the full

power that this website builder can bring to table.

Beside the Free membership, there are 3 paid plans with price tags for

everyone’s wallet. You can take a look at the picture bellow to see what features

are included in each plan.

Starter Plan – This is perfect for those that want a small website to cover their

basic needs. The main benefit here is that you get to remove all the Webs.com ads

and branding like removing Webs footer ad and a ad-free mobile website.

Enhanced Plan – This is where things start to get more interesting. Beside

receiving all the Starter Plan features, your brand start to shine thru the custom

domain name and the custom email addresses. This features bring more points in

the professional department.

PRO Plan – The Webs.com Pro Plan is by far the most complete and the most

powerful of all 3. Even though on their site the Enhanced plan is advertised as the

“Most Popular”, for me the Pro plan is the best. For a difference of only $3/month i

think is by far a better deal.

Why i am saying that ? First of all, because you get the SEO Booster.

But what is SEO Booster anyway ? In short, is a great help to have when you want

to SEO optimize your website. It allows you to insert different titles and

descriptions for every page, it helps you choose the keywords that you need to

focus on in order to get targeted visitors and is constantly showing you where you

need to improve your SEO score and how to it.

For more details you can visit this video that explains it a little better ->

http://vimeo.com/64721095

Apart from this you also get a lot more of…everything ! More space, more

bandwidth, unlimited store items and other things.

If you like the Webs.com builder and decide to pay for a monthly membership, I

recommend taking advantage of the PRO Plan.

Interface

Webs.com has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) meaning

that you can see exactly what you have done and how the website will look like. Is

not like in the old times where you will write some HTML code, than save and

than see how it looks like.

You have the ability to preview your website even before you hit that

publish button so everything is in your total control.

Design / Themes

This is the section where Webs.com will let you down, especially if you are

a picky person or have something very specific in mind as far as design is

concerned. The template gallery offers only around 40 themes for you to choose

from.

There are some themes that offers you the possibility to choose different

color schemes and some will allow you to change the background image but only

from a few pre-defined images/colors; you can’t add your own image.

Another disappointment is the fact that you can’t modify anything in the

HTML/CSS source code and that’s why you can’t find third parties that offer

premium/custom made Webs.com templates.

Customer support

Customer support is available only for the paid members which is something

that you can understand knowing that they host over 40 millions websites.

Starter Plan – Only Email Support

Enhanced Plan – Email + Live Chat Support

PRO Plan – Email + Live Chat + Phone Support

For the Free members there is a very comprehensive knowledgebase located

inside your control panel/dashboard. After trying it for a few minutes, i saw that

everyone of my questions got a good response. So is most likely that you will find

your answers inside your dashboard.

In case you still haven’t found your answer, you can also check out their

forum here -> http://support.webs.com/webs

Bonuses and promotion

There are not a lot of Webs.com coupons codes on the web and most of

those that you find on Coupons like sites are almost always not working.

The only real discount you can have is if you take action and upgrade in the

first 24 hours after you made your account. In your Dashboard you will see a clock

named “Time Remaining” close to the banner where it is advertised the Webs.com

discount for 50% off for the PRO Plan and smaller discounts for the other two

plans.

Step by Step Tutorial To Create Your First Webs.com

Website

Webs.com is a great and very user friendly platform and where you can

build a professional looking website in minutes. In this tutorial i will show step-by-

step how you can do it. Let’s go !

The first thing you need to do is to go to Webs.com and insert the email

address and your chosen password in the “Create an account for free!” box.

After that you need to choose the category that best describes your website.

For this tutorial i will pretend that i am creating a website for my friend’s coffee

shop. So i will choose “Small Business/Pro” and “Food & Beverage” for the right

column.

The next step is to enter the site title. In my case will be “Sallie’s Coffee

Shop”. Depending on what you want your website to be about, you can choose

something more or less brandable.

Webs.com is dedicated to make your experience even easier with the next

step when they ask you to choose the pages you want your website to have, even

before you complete the signup process. With a click you can add or remove any

kind of pages.

On the next step you have choose a theme for your website. They show you

a selection of templates and all you have to do is to click the one you like best. You

can also choose the background color/image on the same screen because after you

choose a theme a few color dots will appear.

The last thing to do is to choose your domain name. You are presented with

2 options :

1) To use a free subdomain with the format www.YourWebsite.webs.com

2) To register and use a custom domain (that you will have to buy thru them) to

have a URL like www.YourWebsite.com

For this tutorial i have chose to go with the free option, as you can see in the

picture below :

When you finished everything above, you will be transferred to the Builder.

Here you will start working on adding content, change settings, adding new pages

or change your theme, if you decide that another template will be more

appropriate.

One of the most important things to change is the information in the header.

On the left side you have your title (you can edit it if you want to change

something) and underneath you can add your tagline/slogan or a simple

description. You also have the option to add your own logo

On the right side you have a few buttons that will allow you to undo changes

and a preview button to see how your website will look like before hitting the

publish button.

The last button is the “Page Settings” where you are presented with a few

options:

Rename Page – You can rename the Home page. The change will reflect in the

header’s information

MetaTags/Description – Here you can add the basic SEO information like Title,

Description and Keywords. * This is available only to the paid memberships

Hide From Navbar – If you choose to hide a page from the navbar

Password Protection – If you want to keep your website private and available

only to certain people. * This is available only to the paid memberships

Change Page Layout – Do you have a certain page layout in mind, maybe

something with left sidebar ? Here you can choose the best one for your needs.

Revert to Published – You can undo all the changes you made since you last

published the site.

Create a New Page - Self explanatory

Content Management Tools

To add content, use a custom layout or add widgets, you will drag & drop

elements from the tabs you have at the bottom of your screen. I will talk about this

4 tabs and their purpose.

General – Here you can choose what kind of content you want to add to your

page. Be it images, text, multimedia files or even build a form. Easily drag & drop

them wherever you want, add the content you press save.

Layout – Choose how you want your page layout to be. Split it in columns, make a

table or even add your custom HTML code.

Social – This is where you can add your social media or subscribe buttons. You

can choose individual buttons for Facebook and Twitter or you can choose “Social

Links” and insert the details for your favorite social media sites (you can choose

from 10 sites)

Commerce – If you choose to create a eCommerce site or just selling a few

products, this where you can find the payment buttons (PayPal and Google

Checkout supported)

Creating A Page

In my test website i have opted to not use a pre-defined layout to see how

hard it is to customize it the way i want. And to my surprise, i have finished a full

page with a lot of different elements in just a few minutes.

The elements i used:

- Title

- Image & Text

- Divider

- 2 Columns from the Layout tab

o In the first column i have added a Youtube video

o In the second column i have added Google Maps

- Spacer

- Social Links

Sounds like a lot, right ? Well, as i said earlier, in just a few minutes the pages

was done. The most time consuming was the content i added (selecting the

images, the vide etc). Bellow you can see the result: