1&1 MyWebsite is a drag-and-drop website builder from German web hosting giant 1&1 IONOS. MyWebsite's Starter plan covers the basics for personal sites. You get unlimited pages and web space, a simple built-in blog, limited SEO settings and website backup and restore.
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You start off with 1&1 MyWebsite by choosing your free domain. You can skip this step if you're not sure yet or own the domain already, and work on the site using a temporary URL instead. At its simplest, you can enter the name and type of site (music, photography, technology, something else), then choose to create an Online Business Card. That's essentially a 'Contact us' page with a name, a little text and some contact details. It might be enough to get started, and you can have it online within minutes.
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Plans and pricing
The first month of MyWebsite is free for any of the main website builder plans. There’s three main web building plans available and you can easily access any of them on the website. Here’s an overview of the plans and prices for all three:
The Creator plan costs $10.00 per month and includes a domain name and email account for one year, social media widgets, business widgets, and multilingual options. There’s a bunch of business-related images you can choose from. This plan works great for small businesses building their own website.
The Creator Plus plan costs $15.00 per month. It comes with everything in the Creator plan and includes additional SEO tutorials and email marketing features. If you really want to have additional marketing tools, this plan has a lot to offer.
The Online Store plan costs $25.00 per month. It comes with everything that the Creator Plus plan does and you can sell up to 5,000 items. This plan is great if you want to sell lots of different items on your website.
Interface
The interface is straight-forward and you're able to choose from more than 400 responsive templates. These are grouped by topics or you can search the collection by keyword, and most of our test searches returned plenty of good-looking designs.
There's a small plus in 1&1 IONOS' inclusion of a few blank templates, where you get all the core layouts, but no graphics. These could make it easier to see the design of a site, as you're no longer distracted by the big photo of a dog, or a skier, or a pizza, or whatever else is plastered over the front page of a regular template.
Click a template thumbnail and you're able to view larger images of the desktop, tablet and mobile views of the sites. Unfortunately, and unlike most of the competition, there's no option to preview the template as an active site in your browser. You can't switch templates later unless you wipe everything and start again, so it's important to choose carefully.
Features
The MyWebsite editor has a very professional look and feel. A preview of your website enables clicking and editing images, text and more. A left-hand toolbar allows adding content, changing layout options and customizing site-level settings. And the menu bar includes options to choose the page, set a view type (desktop, tablet, mobile), undo the current action, preview the site and publish it when you're finished.
We moved our cursor around the page and found that just hovering over an object gave us handles indicating where and how we could move and resize it, and displayed a delete button to remove the object entirely. That's far more visual feedback than you'll get with many editors, which often give you no clue whether it's possible to move or resize objects at all.
Right clicking an image gave us a well-designed context-sensitive menu. This included standard options to replace the image, customize its layout, change alignment or copy the image to the clipboard. An animation tool enables adding eight custom animations, such as fading the image in from the left, or bouncing it in from the right. We were able to selectively hide the object on desktops, tablets or mobile devices, a hugely powerful feature. Experts can even edit the object's HTML and CSS, giving detailed low-level control over functionality.
Less experienced users shouldn't feel left out. Left-clicking the image displayed a simple but feature-packed dialog with buttons to replace the picture, edit it, add or remove links, change the format, style (borders, shadows, rounded corners) and add a range of hover effects.
The competition
One feature that makes the 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite builder stand out is the blogging tool. MyWebsite comes with a simple blogging platform which can be added to your site in seconds. Unusually, this doesn't force you to start with a blank template. If you have an existing blog, point MyWebsite at its RSS feed and it can import your posts, images and Disqus comments, ideal for ensuring a smooth migration from your previous host. There’s a lot of different website builders out there (Webs.com, RIVYT, Odoo, and DreamHost). But not all website builders have blogging tools with multiple features.
Final thoughts
It's a little more expensive than some, but MyWebsite's appealing templates, well-designed editor and powerful bonus features enable anyone to build feature-packed and professional websites.
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