For the past two weeks or so we  have  been busy creating new videos.

I think videos are by far the best way to present website builders as a good screencast can tell you so much more about a software tool than text. The only two disadvantages are that video production is a lot more time-consuming than creating text and it's much harder to keep up-to-date.

In case you are interested: we have created all of these videos with Camtasia Studio 7. This program is not cheap at all but I have to say it's really great. If you want to create videos for your website but are not ready to spend this kind of money right now, try one of the free alternatives like CamStudio or Screenr.

I hope you like our new videos:
 

Review of Weebly

Review of Jimdo

And there are even more videos
 

What is an online website builder and how does it work?

Weebly: creating a free account and choosing a domain name

Jimdo: signing up for an account and choosing a domain name

If you don't want to miss any videos please subscribe to our YouTube channel. And in case you have any questions about video production, please let me know in the comments below!

Microsoft used to offer a neat website builder called Office Live Small Business (OLSB). It was never perfect but it was free, easy to use and the name Microsoft promised a solid company behind it.

In late 2010 Microsoft announced that the service would be discontinued leading to more than 100 mostly very  angry  comments. The funny thing is that Microsoft has since repeatedly claimed: "we have been listening to your feedback".

They obviously haven’t.
 

Screenshot taken from OLSB blog


April 30, 2012 will mark the end of OLSB. I have no idea why they need to shut the whole thing down – to annoy this many customers simply makes no sense at all. Even when you are Microsoft.
 

20 pages to self-transition your site to Office 365

The replacement product is called Office 365. I guess everyone thought that at least it would be an easy process to get the old site into the new system. After all, both OLSB and Office 365 are Microsoft products. Chances are that once you’ve read the 20 page self-transition guide (Word doc) you won’t find it easy at all. Every single step involves doing things manually.
 

The nature of website builders

A hosted site builder comes with a lot of benefits but also with one major disadvantage: Your provider has to stay in business or at least keep the product in their portfolio. Microsoft is far from going out of business, but they decided to do away with it anyway.
 

Office Live Small Business alternatives

We have always been advocates of online website builders. However, we only recommend specialized site builders from companies who are truly dedicated to their mission. That’s why we look at how they are financed and we also have met in person with some of the providers to get a feel for the respective companies.

So if you want to continue with a hosted site building service, please take a look at our comparison chat. Here you can also find recommendations suited particularly to small business websites.

In case you are looking for a different solution, for example an Open Source CMS, you could check out Wordpress.org and hire someone on Elance to help you create it. Make sure you check the ratings before choosing a provider.


If you have any comments about Microsoft’s move, please let me know!

Image: © Sean Gladwell - Fotolia.com
 

BaseKit started out in 2008, so is still a relative newcomer to the website builder market. The British company has positioned itself in the high-end category, somewhere between Wordpress.org and Weebly.

BaseKit doesn’t use a Freemium model, and in this it is similar to the longer-established New-York-based provider Squarespace. Indeed,    comparing the websites  of the two  , you can’t help getting the impression that BaseKit have been taking inspiration from their colleagues in the US in other aspects too.

BaseKit pricing

A trial version of BaseKit* is available for a 14-day period. Limited to only three web pages, the trial version is a bit too restrictive to really try it out properly, however. We therefore obtained the full Business version for our review.

Our advice to the BaseKit team would be to give users access to a full website kit as a trial version – it will make it harder for people to leave after that!

Apart from the trial version, the BaseKit packages available are Basic, Business and Professional. The Business package seems the most useful at $14 (£8) per month with a one-year contract. It includes your own domain name and unlimited web pages.

Setting up a website with BaseKit

Having registered and logged in, you choose your website template – and BaseKit offers some very nice designs indeed.

  
Once you have chosen a template you get a basic website with dummy content, which you can then start to customize. Additional elements are displayed in the left-hand column and are inserted simply by using drag’n’drop.

This really is exactly as easy as it sounds. You can also move elements around very easily and arrange them whichever way you like. There is plenty of room for creativity. BaseKit also offers lots of useful additional functionalities, such as a search function, a comment widget, form templates and a nice photo carousel plug-in.

Social Media integration is also included, of course, as are e-commerce buttons for PayPal and Google Checkout. You do need at least the Business package for the latter. Nevertheless, for a fully fledged online shop BaseKit is probably not really the right tool. Incidentally, Squarespace doesn’t yet offer any e-commerce functionality at all.

Now for a few minor problems I’ve had with BaseKit. For example, I found it quite complicated to change the banner graphics or navigation for the entire website. Tech support suggested that I should use the template widgets. To figure out how this works exactly took me quite a while.

It's interesting how Basekit's approach to create different site structures compares to the one of Squarespace. Both ways have their pros and cons.

Having said that, it doesn’t do any harm in principle to understand the basics of how HTML and CSS work together. With BaseKit, just as with Squarespace, you will soon come across terms like Border, Margin, Padding etc., and it helps to have some basic background knowledge so you can understand what these words refer to.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As far as SEO is concerned, BaseKit passes with flying colors. You can access all relevant areas and are even able to set up 301 redirects. Here BaseKit can certainly hold its own against its US counterpart.

Functionalities we were missing

One thing we would have expected from a comprehensive toolkit like BaseKit is an integrated blog function. And my guess is that this will probably be added sooner or later. Also, similar to Squarespace, BaseKit lacks a mobile-friendly website version. I think, in this day and age, when the Internet is increasingly being accessed through smartphones and tablet devices, this is no longer acceptable. So this should really be addressed urgently.

Support

The system is well documented and we also found the Live Chat Support especially useful. The BaseKit team seems to place particular importance on excellent support, something we very much endorse.

Conclusion

BaseKit offers an extremely promising platform with great potential. We also welcome the fact that Squarespace is now finally facing some real competition. Perhaps this will help speed up the development cycles of the American provider, which can be a little on the slow side.

At the moment Squarespace still seems the more rounded and further advanced of the two. In particular its brilliant blog function is as yet unrivalled – as are its membership functions and the Business package.

Anyone seriously interested in a premium website builder tool should definitely give both providers a go. A clear bonus of BaseKit are its fresh and contemporary designs. You can try Basekit free for 14 days*.

If, on the other hand, you are a complete novice to website creation, I would recommend sticking with one of the less complex website builders like Jimdo or Weebly.

*Affiliate link

How often does your website look like this?

 
A website that’s off-line is not a great first impression for your business.

With online website builders we usually have no control over where the site is hosted. We are therefore at the mercy of the web host chosen on our behalf by the provider.

We wanted to know how they perform and have been monitoring the server availability of websites created using major website building tools such as Weebly, Jimdo, Wix.com, Webnode and Webs.com over a 4.5 month period.

To get the full picture we used Pingdom to monitor their uptime, as well as speed and response time.

Not all website builders provide 99.9% uptime

The testing took place between June 18 and November 5, 2011. Three out of the five providers tested achieved very good results. Weebly leads the field with an uptime percentage of 99.96. Webnode, too, gives no reason for complaint with a respectable 99.94%.

Jimdo was a little unfortunate as it experienced an extensive downtime of nearly two hours, shortly before the end of our testing period. If we had stopped our monitoring on October 31 its uptime score would have been 99.99%.

Here are the results in detail:

Notes:

ms = milliseconds, DE = Germany, CZ = Czech Republic, JP= Japan
Monitoring of uptime took place once per minute through Pingdom. Pingdom runs tests from 37 different locations throughout North America and Europe. Per service provider only one randomly selected website was tested. The test results include scheduled maintenance.
 

The top 3 service providers achieved results above 99.9% – the common uptime promise of many hosting companies.

We also tested Squarespace, but found out afterwards that the website we were using for the test had an unusual configuration, set up by the website owners themselves, which unfortunately skewed the test results and rendered them useless for the purpose of our comparison.

Response times: Which provider has the fasted server?

Anyone calling up a Jimdo website from the US will be able to view the site within an average of 228 milliseconds. Weebly, too, is one of the faster providers.

Webnode and Webs.com, on the other hand, are a little on the slow side with an average wait of 1000 milliseconds and more. Admittedly, Webnode’s server is based in the Czech Republic, which may explain the delay. Why Webs’ response time is so slow is a mystery, as its websites are hosted within the US.

Load time, by the way (and not to be confused with response time), is not only important from a user perspective but is also one of Google’s new ranking criteria (although content relevance still remains the most crucial one).

And one has to bear in mind, of course, that load time also depends on the size of the site to be loaded. So, for example, not compressing images properly will make your website slower to load.
 

Jimdo offers a range of server locations
 

When it comes to response times, the server location is a significant factor. Whereas Weebly, Wix.com, Webs and Webnode are content with offering servers in their own country only, Jimdo offers servers based in the USA, Europe and Japan.

Jimdo allocates the respective server automatically, depending on the continent from which the majority of visitors access a website. For example, when accessing a website from the UK it can make a huge difference which side of the Atlantic the website is hosted.

With 81Solution you can find out the location of your website's server yourself.

Again, Google also likes it when a website is hosted in the same part of the world where its target audience comes from.

Conclusion

These results show that almost all of the website builders offer acceptable uptime levels that are perfectly sufficient for smaller websites. Especially Weebly and Jimdo showed very encouraging test results both in terms of uptimes and response times.

Keep in mind that it can be a good idea to check whether your preferred provider has a server in the country where your target audience is located.

You can download screenshots of the original  Pingdom results here .

If you have any questions or further observations please feel free to leave a comment.

The next stop on my road air trip was San Francisco.

Jimdo's office is located in San Francisco's Mission district, where a lot of start up companies are based. Very interesting place.

I had the chance to talk to Powen Shiah who is Jimdo's US Country Manager. Enjoy the interview (and sorry about the bad lightening - I still need some practice):
 

Links mentioned in the video:
basic cookies
Dropbox
Square

It rained a lot that day and I did in fact stay a little longer. Jimdo's office is in a coworking space, meaning I had the chance to chat with Rishi and Robert from a company called DigiOh.

Their service enables you to sell digital goods through a custom link. Interesting service and they invited us for a beer :)

Anyway, I hope you liked the second part of the WebsiteToolTester US Tour. Next will be Weebly!
(Update: Weebly's CEO Dan Veltri agreed in our meeting to answer a couple of questions in a text-based interview - unfortunately we never got it from him).

Here's what you can do now:

Find out more about Jimdo

Read our Jimdo review

Or take Jimdo for a test drive
 

P.S. If you ever go to San Francisco, you really have to rent a bicycle and cycle over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. It's fantastic! Take a look at the pictures below.
 

The video was recorded on Oct 10 2011.