SnapPages Review

Full review

For those wanting a simple and basic website creation package for a personal website SnapPages is ideal. Businesses and people who want a lot of features and widgets may not find what they are looking for. On the whole, SnapPages is a well-priced offering but it doesn’t give you everything. We took a closer look at the included features and available tools in the SnapPages package.

Sign up

The SnapPages site doesn’t offer you as many choices in terms of plans as other online website creation services, although what you do get is simply explained and reasonably priced. The Personal account is actually free, although it is certainly not recommended for businesses or serious webpage developers as the package lacks features. However, it is a decent plan for people who want a simple site for family, friends or hobbies.

The Pro account is priced at $8 per month. With the Pro plan you get more storage (10GB), unlimited pages, a lot more themes and a range of features. There is currently a 14-day free trial on the Pro account. The Developer account is a higher level plan for $30 a month. Here too you get 10GB of space and unlimited pages. You also get developer features and tools for full control over the design and management of your website. The Developer is designed for designers, giving you access to multiple sites and the ability to log in and out of client sites.

Following sign-up you are taken through the set up process by a wizard that gives you the options to input your site name and then takes you through the process of setting up appropriate pages for your website, whether it is a business site or a personal site.

Design Options

If you opt for the Personal or Pro account you don’t get many options to customize the design of your site and you work with pre-made templates. These templates are good for the beginner and someone who wants an easy to use, simple site but more experienced designers will find the customization options too limited. Drag and drop features within your page to create the look you want. When using the templates you start from scratch and design each page individually, which can be frustrating if you just want to copy an old page and change the content and images.

The Developer account gives you full control over your website. Create custom themes using the CSS editor, add your own branding and manage client websites through your own account.

Widgets

With the free Personal website you get online albums and slideshows for your photos, a blog for images, text, videos and maps, and an online calendar. There is also a feature where you can allow access to certain parts of your website only to friends or other users.

The Pro account offers more widgets, including Flash billboards and embedded videos, and contact forms. You can also add HTML or JavaScript in order to embed your own widgets from third party providers.

Features

Ecommerce – We couldn’t find any reference to ecommerce facilities with the SnapPages tools. Unless you are working with the Developer package you don’t get the ecommerce tools included with either the free Personal website or the Pro site.

SEO – The Pro account includes a number of different built-in SEO tools such as the ability to add meta tags to your site. There is not a whole lot of SEO capability built into these packages, and other providers do offer more as standard.

Reporting – The SnapPages Pro account is designed for businesses and includes monitoring tools and an integration with Google Analytics.

Hosting & domains

Unfortunately there is no free domain registration with this package. With the SnapPages Pro account you have the option of purchasing a custom domain name for your site, or alternatively you can point your existing domain name to your SnapPages site. It would be nice if there was the option of a domain registration included in the package.

Ease of use

SnapPages is certainly simple to use. The site editor is self explanatory and you’ll be able to tell how to use the system with just a few tries. Useful features include the ability to customize the theme without altering the layout of the page or change the layout without affecting the page content. We thought the online creation tools weren’t the fastest available, especially if you have a lot of content, but the general package is easy to manage.

Help & support

You need to fill out a support ticket to get help from the SnapPages team but the response time is quick. Unfortunately there is no 24-hour phone contact option but there is a Knowledge Base where you can browse some FAQs and additional help topics.

Overall

A well-packaged, simple set of tools for creating your personal or small business website. The SnapPages collection is good for beginners and offers a reasonable amount of features.