Yola is a great website builder that offers would-be designers an intuitive, user-friendly way to create professional looking websites. It offers a wide array of tools for those who want to truly explore and experiment with the web design process. For those who want to be able to create appealing, effective websites that can be designed fairly easily without any extensive coding knowledge, Yola might be a perfect choice.
Design Features
Those who want to start creating a site need only register for an account by providing a name and email address. After doing so, designers can begin by selecting a template. The initial selection is offered only for free accounts, though there are many more options to choose for paid accounts. After selecting a template, users can choose a name and category for their site. Various options offered include, “artist/photographer,” “building and construction,” “food and restaurants,” or “travel and hotel”. There are almost twenty choices in all from which designers can select.
Yola allows designers a variety of options, from creating a simple blog to making a business website, or even adding an online store to an existing site. Many web building sites use sidebars for design tools, but Yola offers most of its design options from a tab menu with toolbars across the top of the page. These tabs give designers the option to choose from the online store, pages, SEO, sites, style, and widgets. Yola’s drag and drop design feature is useful for new designers, and allows them to incorporate widgets without requiring a knowledge of HTML. However, Yola does offer an HTML code element that allows designers to drop in any embed codes from around the web.
In addition to the aforementioned options, designers can add various elements to their sites like file downloads, Tumblr and Flickr fees, online videos, and even MP3 players. Yola offers widgets for several kinds of social sharing, including elements from both Facebook and Twitter. Users also have the option to add PayPal product and donate buttons, and even more “store” options are available with Yola’s $10 per month online store option. While designing various pages, it is easy to switch back and forth from one to the other on the “page” tab.
Another nice feature that Yola offers is the new mobile site-building option. Yola typically displays the full desktop version of a site on mobile elements, unless mobile publishing is enabled. This option enables users to choose mobile-friendly menu buttons, to change the background color and font used, and to turn off the site’s banner images. Yola also offers an SEO Scan option, which easily sifts through your website’s content and provides scores on multiple aspects of the site in terms of search engine optimization.
Pricing Options
Yola does have a free site offering, which is limited to three pages and 1 GB of bandwidth and storage. All Yola packages include trustworthy hosting with 99.9% uptime, Google map integration, password protection, search engine friendly design, one-click web publishing, and various social sharing options.
Those who wish to upgrade to a “Bronze” account for $4.16 per month will receive 5MB of online storage, as well as a custom domain name registration. The Yola “Silver” account for $8.33 increases the storage capacity to 100GB, removes all Yola advertisements, and includes Facebook page and mobile site publishing. Those who choose the “Gold” account for $16.66 receive the aforementioned features, as well as unlimited storage and SEO features. Choosing to add a Yola store to any paid level costs an additional $10 per month.
Customer Service and Conclusory Thoughts
Yola prides itself on great customer support, and offers telephone support for all new customers. It also offers chat support and email assistance at any time of day, as well as a Yola Help Center, which includes a number of tutorials and documentation that will guide designers in the process of creating their sites.
Yola also offers traffic reporting services, as well as “Traffic Builder,” “Local Boost,” and “SiteWit” features. Together, these services offer traffic numbers, as well as a graph for visits, and boxes showing the number of visitors, unique visitors, and page views.
If you’re looking for a web-building service that is easy to use, offers a full web store, and great social features, Yola is an excellent choice. Designers will find that it’s simple enough to build a site quickly, but also loaded with great features that will really make your site stand out, and help you achieve your web design goals. Try it today!