Ucraft Review

Ucraft is a popular website builder platform that is designed to make the whole process of designing a website easy and seamless. It boasts of a number of templates to help anyone get started. It has a drag and drop page builder to make sure that the process is easy for everyone including newbies. In this article, we are going to review the Ucraft website builder and discuss some of its features.

Ucraft Website Builder is a modern website builder that gives users a very easy time when creating a website. This is made better by the drag and drop website builder that comes with it. To dive into this, we will first get started with using Ucraft. The first step is to create an account. They have made this easy by enabling one to create an account within a click by using their social media platforms such as Google or Facebook. You can also spare a few seconds and follow the traditional way of creating an account. Within a few seconds, you will be done with this and ready to go onto developing your website. 

After you log in, Ucraft gives you two options to get started. You can either decide to get started with a blank template that you will entirely edit and design to a website, or you can choose a template from the themes available. The second option is very good for newbies or people who do not have experience in website design. This is because you get almost everything done for you. Ucraft allows you to preview the themes before settling on one. You can even change a theme midway through development with this website builder. 

Ucraft has a free plan and a 14-day free trial for all the other paid plans. It is advisable to sign up for this trial period to test the website builder and get familiar with it before you can pay any subscription fee.

Ucraft comes with a powerful editor that allows you to simply drag and drop content onto it. This is something we have seen on almost all the other website builders in a bid to make the process easy for all. It comes with blocks such as headers, footers, contact blocks among others already made for you. You will find it very easy to add these blocks to your website.

However, I think Ucraft made a mistake in that it is not possible to move the blocks around. Each of these blocks is made to stay at the prescribed sections and cannot be moved. To make this better, you can modify the blocks by adding a couple of elements with a click. There are several elements on the editor screen such as media files, sliders, galleries, and text blocks. These elements can be used to modify the blocks to match your website requirements.

Once you have a template to use, all you will need to do is simply drag and drop any element that you need to the page you want to modify to change its position, content, color, spacing among others to get exactly what you are looking for. You can also change opacity, background image, alignment, block positioning to either horizontal or vertical and color settings on the elements and blocks.

Images are a part of the look and feel of any website. To make sure that you get a modern website with an amazing image management, Ucraft gives you a powerful image management tool that allows you to upload images from your computer – by dragging and dropping them or manually uploading them – or choose from free images availed to you by Unsplash.  

All the uploaded images are stored in your Ucraft account. They can be accessed through the images section and used later. 

Any image uploaded to the site can also be customized to fit the requirements of your website. As shown below, you can crop, change image description, title and alt, change the blur level, add a hover image as well as hover effects. You can also customize any titles, descriptions, and buttons that might appear on top of the images.

This is very interesting compared to other website builder platforms. It gives you deep customization features to make sure that you get the best website for your business.

Ucraft comes with a page management button on the dashboard that allows you to see all the pages that you have, duplicate a page, open a page, delete and even password protect any of the pages. The pages section is classified into three categories – Main Pages, Secondary Pages, and System Pages. 

Main pages comprise of the website’s normal pages such as the homepage, the contact us page and the about us page. Secondary pages consist of those pages that do not really talk to your clients about your business or what you offer but things like the business policy and terms and conditions. The system pages consist of 404 pages, signing pages among others.

You can edit a few features from the Pages section as well. You can change the page title, add an alias, change the target to either self or to a new tab and change who can see the page – public, only logged in users or only logged out users.

Ucraft comes with a large collection of templates that are tailored to meet the needs and requirements of different industries. They come with full-screen formats, rich in features, content tailored to specific industries and flat designs that outshine almost all other website builders. 

When getting started, you are given an option to either get a theme or start with a blank template. As discussed earlier, starting with a blank template requires one to be quite good at website design. Most people would find it easy getting a theme that meets their requirements. Ucraft gives you a description of every theme that they have. You can also preview the themes before settling on one.

The themes are classified into different industry-specific categories among them business, eCommerce, restaurants, arts, events. Blog, healthcare and app. This is very clever from Ucraft since it makes sure that its customers go straight to the desired category to choose a theme that they want for their business.

Ucraft describes its themes as mobile-friendly and capable of adapting to different screen sizes. This means that your website visitors will get an amazing user experience on all devices. Although you have this assurance, you cannot modify your content for the mobile view. The content will remain the same for both desktop and mobile view throughout. However, you can choose to have the site blocks aligned either vertically or horizontally on the different displays.

Ucraft text editing features are among the simplest I have come across so far. Let us say that you have added a block with text that you need to edit. All you have to do is clicking on the text to edit and change it to anything that you want. You even get a text formatting tool on clicking on the text to edit. This tool allows you to change things like adding a paragraph or a heading, bold, italicized, strikethrough or underlined text, adding code, changing the font family, font size, line height, alignment and letter spacing, adding a link, an ordered list, adding a table and changing the text and background color among others. You can do all these from within a single panel instead of having to wander to different places looking for these features.

Ucraft has done a pretty good job of making sure that sites designed with the website builder get a fare ranking on all search engines. It allows you to optimize your website through the SEO option that is available on the dashboard. Clicking on the SEO menu on the dashboard opens all your pages with SEO customization options as shown below;

Here, Ucraft allows you to add a title for every page on the website as well as a description for the pages. You can even decide to allow search engines to index the pages or not. Ucraft also automatically generates a sitemap for your website. You can decide to either have all your website pages included in the sitemap or not.

Ucraft comes with a number of integrations that you can use to evaluate traffic to your website. It allows you to integrate your website with Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics as well as Hotjar that can be used to track the behavior of your website visitors. These are options that even if are available in other website builders, most of them do not have the functionalities that Ucraft gives you.

Ucraft gives its users a very easy way to create a blog for your website. A beginner might find it a little bit difficult to find out where or how to get started with blogging. This is because of how hidden this feature is. To get access to the blogging feature, you have to go to articles on the dashboard.

Clicking on articles opens a window that allows you to create a new blog post. You also see all the blog posts available with the template you chose (if it had any blog posts). The posts on this screen are neatly arranged with filtering options – keyword, date or category. Here, you can edit, delete, add new categories and feeds to new and existing blog posts. When you click on the “+” button, you can create a new blog post. The editor here is quite basic though, and allows only text formatting and adding images.

Among all the website builders I have worked with, Ucraft has one of the easiest to use blogging features. 

We cannot talk about Ucraft and forget about this feature which gives it an edge over other website builders. It gives you an option that allows you to create a custom logo for your website using Ucraft’s logo maker. This is very important especially for beginners who apart from lacking web development skills, do not have design skills. You can easily access the logo maker feature from the dashboard option. This takes you to a screen that allows you to create a logo for your business. 

The logo maker allows you to add shapes, icons, and text. You can then format them by changing the color, font, font size and all other text formatting features included. You can save your logos and use them anytime you are building a different website under the same account.

Ucraft has not been left behind in making sure that its clients can create an eCommerce store through their website builder platform. However, to make sure that they give you the best, they partnered with another company, Ecwid. Ecwid is an e-commerce platform that helps one to easily create bold, easy to use online stores and start selling anywhere online or in person. 

My opinion with the partnership is that this gives their clients the best option to get an amazing eCommerce store for their business. This is because Ecwid specializes in eCommerce stores, meaning that they are among the best in that field. This leaves Ucraft to concentrate on the other sides of web development. It is actually cheaper if you bought a Ucraft subscription to design an eCommerce store compared to if you went straight to Ecwid.

The eCommerce option can be accessed through the dashboard. This takes you to a new window through which you can customize the store, add products, verify geo settings and set up shipping and payment methods. The process is straight forward and very easy for anyone. It would actually take you a couple of minutes to get it set up and working.

Ucraft also gives you a dashboard through which you can track all your orders, sales, abandoned carts, and all your customers’ information. You can even connect your social media pages through the dashboard and sell your products to your followers on those channels. 

Ucraft, like any other website builder, has several ways of offering support to its customers. The first one is the live chat feature that is available on the bottom right of every page. To see how responsive the support team is, I started a conversation and posted a simple question. After a few seconds, I got a notification that my message was not seen yet and that Ucraft typically replies in a few hours. What would happen if I really needed help and didn’t have a few hours? I think this is very poor from them, and it does not even deserve the name live chat. I did not get a response in up to four hours.

While still waiting for a response on the chat feature, I got a few more notifications giving me articles that I could read and maybe get a solution to my question. I found this a little bit interesting since a customer can actually learn more about the problem they were facing and avoid similar problems in the future. Ucraft also has a help center through which you can browse through hundreds of help articles. You can also use the help center to search for a specific issue that could have been solved before. This option is far much better than the live chat feature.

Ucraft has a free plan as well as three other paid plans which are billed annually. The three paid plans include the Pro Website at $ 10 per month, Pro Shop at $ 21 per month and BigCommerce at $ 39 per month. These plans have different levels of access to premium features like Google Fonts, eCommerce tools, real-time tracking, and on-site search. Ucraft has a 14 day free trial with any paid plan that you choose.

Even though Ucraft has some features such as the Blogging feature a little bit hidden, it is easy to use even for a beginner. The website builder comes with almost all features that anyone would want to have when designing their website and they are all easy to use.

However, even though there are tens of themes to choose from, they are all almost similar, making it a little bit limited compared to other website builders. The use of content blocks that cannot be moved around makes it not ideal for people who want to have 100% customization ability. It is, however, an amazing website builder platform for a beginner.