There are so many ways to get your personal or business information on the Web these days. While social networks are a great option, more demanding individuals and organizations insist on an actual custom website. WebStarts offers a fairly full-featured and very customizable option for building a desktop and mobile site, but it's a bit more expensive than competing website builders, such as Squarespace and Wix. It doesn't offer a third-party widget store, as those services do, nor are its tools or the sites it produces quite as slick.
Pricing and Getting Started
Tap the on the WebStarts home page's Get Started Now button, and before you even enter an email address or decide on a plan level, you get a selection of site templates. There are hundreds to choose from, and while the designs are mostly conventional, they are reasonably attractive. We're not talking Squarespace slickness here, but you should be able to find one that appeals to your target audience. You can choose from among 47 site categories to filter the design choices, from Animals to Weddings.
Right after you select a template, you need to create an account with a name, email address, and password. You then choose a domain name for your site, which can either be in the form yoursitename.webstarts.com for free, or you can purchase a custom domain for $4.89 per month, which is steep. Competitors like Wix only charge $14.95 per year for this, and an independent domain registrar like pairNIC charges $13 per year. (Read How to Register a Domain Name for Your Website for more help with this.)
After you choose a domain, WebStarts shows you video that explains how to build a website with the service. The home page exhorts you to upgrade: Your choices begin with the $9.78-per-month Pro plan, which is often discounted, and which does not include a domain name but does include unlimited site pages, 5GB of storage, 25GB bandwidth, and email tech support. The $14.32-per-month Pro Plus plan does include domain registration, adds mobile site optimization and SEO tools, and provides 10GB storage, 100GB bandwidth, and phone support. A $39.98-per-month Business account is the lowest tier that includes a Web store, and it also throws in email marketing and CRM.
Interface
WebStarts' home screen, or Dashboard, is a bit cheesy and ad-heavy compared with slicker competitors like Squarespace and Wix, but the site designer itself is clear and simple to use. A black border keeps a toolbar rail along the left and menu options across the top. Click the toolbar's Add button and out flies a good selection of page elements. These aren't drag and drop, as they are in many site builders. Instead, you click on the element and then the sub-element—for example Text, then Paragraph L, M, or S (or Header L, M, or S and so on)—and it's dropped onto your page near the toolbar, leaving you to drag it where you really want it.
Unlike site builders that deliver responsive design, WebStarts lets you drag and resize elements anywhere and anyhow you like. Those who want control over a website's exact layout will appreciate this. Guidelines appear as you move content around to help with positioning. There's a good selection of element types, too. You can add images (more on these later), text, boxes, buttons, galleries, slideshows, icons, contact forms, calendars, maps, document downloads, social buttons, and music and video players. Compound elements called Content Blocks are helpful for things like photo, text, or button grids. Double-clicking on text lets you easily edit and format it. For quicker access, another toolbar across the top lets you add text, color fills, images, sounds, videos
Only three page types are at your disposal from the Add Page dialog: Home, Contact, and About. This falls far short of competitors like DudaOne, which offer many more specific page types. While editing the site, you have to choose the page you want to work on from a dropdown list: Other builders simply let you click on the page link in the site preview.
Undo and Redo buttons on toolbar work for only edits you've made since the previous save, and they don't work for everything you do in the builder, such as adding pages. There are no right-click options such as those offered by Wix, but clicking on any element brings up edit options.
Working With Images
Webstarts gets high points for image editing and management. When you add a photo or slideshow to your webpage, you start by choosing from image files you've already uploaded, from a decent selection of stock photography, from your Facebook uploads, or from pictures you shoot within the app from your webcam. I couldn't get the last one to work very well, however. You can upload multiple image files at once and even create folders (and drag-and-drop images onto them) to organize them for easier access.
Once choose an image for the webpage, you can edit it with the online Aviary image editing tools, either before or after placing it on the page. And it's the full panoply of Aviary tools, including blemish removal, lighting adjustments, and effects filters. As with any other page objects, you can apply animations to images, including bounce, fade, rotate, and zoom. These can be fun, but don't overuse them, unless you want to induce vertigo in your page viewers.
Gallery options are more limited, being simple grids, though you can choose whether to have space between the images or use oval thumbnails. On the live site, you can view galleries as full-window slideshows. The Slideshow element itself places a rotating group of images that actually don't enlarge to fill the browser window. These automatically cycle through the photos (or videos) you include, and you can choose transition types and speeds. You can even link these images to other pages, sites, email addresses, file downloads, or anchor points on the page.
Making Money With Your Site
Store options are reasonably robust. For business-level subscribers, there are two entry points for listing products for sale on your site: the Store button on the main toolbar, and the Sell Products choice in the content object list. There's no simple PayPal button, unfortunately, for those who just have one thing to sell or are seeking donations. But the Sell Products option is easy to use, with a wizard to take you through the steps of listing your goods.
You can list a product for sale on your live site and have a viewer get to an online shopping cart, but it won't work unless you do the back-end setup. You do get a good choice of payment processors: Stripe, WePay, Authorize.net, and PayPal. You can choose among nine store design themes, and you can also add custom text and graphics. Users sign up and log into your site, to keep better track of them. This also provides a list of emails for marketing, which is included with WebStarts Business. The email marketing tool is robust, letting you format and add images (though not images you've already uploaded to your WebStarts storage.)
The store does allow you to sell digital downloads, have users specify options like size and color for your products, and keep track of your inventory on hand. But there's no integration to automate shipping charges with UPS, FedEx, or USPS. I didn't see a way to put items on sale or offer incentive discounts.
Mobile
Like many site builders, WebStarts has a button for viewing your site as it would appear on a smartphone. By default, the mobile versions of sites build in WebStarts don't look bad. You get a touch-friendly page menu, and objects are centered. In fact, sites created in WebStarts are somewhat responsive, meaning if you shrink the browser width, page objects realign to fit the smaller space. But because of Webstarts' unrestricted content-placement ability, some items don't appear in the mobile view, and I saw some blank areas on the phone view in my testing. This is an example of the trade-off between full responsive design and the abilty to place objects where you want them on the page. If you want a guarantee that your site will look right on mobile with no tinkering, stick with one of the strict responsive-design website builders such as Squarespace or Weebly. But realize that you get less customizability with those services.
Users with Pro Plus or Business accounts can fix problems in mobile viewing by removing objects or rearranging them. They can also change the background image or color for the mobile view. I also found in myself that the automatic Reorder Layout button could fix mobile viewing problems without much effort. Unfortunately, my oval photo gallery thumbnails got squished.
Blogging
A top-level Blog button with a pencil icon takes you to the Blog Manager, where you can write, schedule, and post your thoughts. I do like this ability to schedule post publishing, but the editor was very limited compared with the blogging tools in other site-building services. I didn't see layout options or even the ability to add pictures to posts. In fact, the only formatting options are adding links to selected text, boldfacing it, italicizing it, or making it a heading. If you want to be able to create rich blog posts, WebStarts is not for you.
Publishing
I wasn't aware that my site was already live soon after I started working on it. WebStarts does have Save, Preview, and View Site buttons, but I found that site edits I made sometimes went live even without my pressing the Save button. I prefer builders, such as Wix, that let you explicitly decide when your site is ready to go live and let you build preview nonpublished versions. Once you hit WebStarts' Save icon, your latest changes go live, and you see a box asking you to share the site via Facebook, Twitter, or email.
Stats and SEO
If you take the trouble to create and publish a website, you probably want to know how many people are reading, and which pages they're visiting. With a WebStarts site, unfortunately, you have to pay extra to get any statistics at all. For $6.58 per month (discounted to $3.29 if you pay for a full year), you can see, according to WebStarts, "Real Time Updates Of Every Action By Every Visitor." The $9.88-per-month Web Statistics Plus plan gets you the ability to track email campaign performance and see mobile visitor data. The analytics show just about everything you could want, from visitor demographics and technology summaries to alerts. There's even a Big Screen mode to show you live traffic. But for a site builder with rich site stats included at no extra cost, check out DudaOne.
A Good Start?
WebStarts offers most everything you need to produce full-featured desktop and mobile sites, and it allows more leeway in design than strictly responsive-design solutions like Squarespace and Wix. At its higher price tiers, you also get more control over your mobile site. Because of this freedom, however, your mobile-site results aren't always predictable. Furthermore, WebStarts' builder tools aren't as well designed, the service lacks a well-stocked third-party widget library, and it costs more that most competitors. Site statisics, for example, are only available for an extra fee. For slick, full-powered, and reasonably priced DIY website-building experience, consider our top picks, DudaOne or Wix, or the highly rated Squarespace.
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