iBuilt Website Builder – Review Rating: 5 
Thumbs up
§ Easy to follow step-by-step approach.
§ Range of advanced e-commerce tools.
§ Very well thought out promotional tools.
§ Elaborate HELP menu and reliable support.
§ Risk Free trial period.
Thumbs down
§ Because of the extensive feature set, it takes more time to learn than some simpler systems.
§ No real time suggestions.
User Friendliness
Rating: 5
Generally, website builders choose between versatility and ease of use. iBuilt tries to strike a balance between them and it has been remarkably successful in doing so.
iBuilt's new user interface, that can be optionally enabled, has a simple elegance to it. The ajax driven drop down menus bring the most commonly used options to the front, thus reducing unnecessary steps. You will be able to accomplish almost any task without resorting to the help section.
The Store area has convenient options to manage a fully featured web storefront. Products can be easily created and edited, payment gateway setup is a snap, and it includes advanced features like coupons, gift certificates, shipping calculators for fedex, ups, USPS, DHL, Canada Post, and Australia post. It also allows for customized checkout and shopping cart buttons, sales tax calculator, inventory control, upsell/related products, email notifications, a robust order management area, intensive ecommerce reports, subscription based products, downloadable products, and many for advanced tools.
Designing tools
Rating: 5
The builder is credited with an extensive set of relatively advanced designer tools. These designing tools ensure that you have complete control over all aspects of your website.
iBuilt includes a feature packed design area where you will find a complete range of website design and management tools. You can select your design, add a logo, change background images, setup color schemes, save multiple versions of your site design, change your header image, setup an image-based or text-based website menu, manage web pages, customize your designs and upload graphics, setup your content titles, and manage content group boxes.
The Page list manager allows to manage all of your website pages including adding password protection, setting user and group level security, organizing pages and page groups, adding new pages, reordering pages in the menu, and more. You can add a calendar page, message board, blog, feedback form, chat room, blog, FAQ, sitemap, polling booth, or just a standard page. By request, they also can enable an appDB feature that allows you to setup a basic database of information that can be displayed to the visitors.
As far as editing capabilities are concerned, the already built and customizable page layouts provide for easy editing and remarkable flexibility. The Image gallery is very comprehensive with features like an Image rotator, thumbnail viewer, and image slider. The sidebar features allow content to be posted on individual pages, or site-wide and can be disabled on any page.
Editing tools
Rating: 4.5
iBuilt comes with two integrated WYSIWIG editors for editing your website's content. One editor is setup as the default for Internet Explorer, and the other ("text editor v. 2") is enabled when using other browsers. V2 is an impressive improvement that seems to be cross browser capable. Both editors not only include the staple features like cut, copy, paste, bold, italic, etc - they also have options to add an image within your text, create tables, links, named anchors, font face, size, color, and others. iBuilt editing tools are capable of producing desired result in minimal time.
Promotional tools
Rating: 5
iBuilt easily has the possibly the widest range of promotional tools as compared to other builders in its class. The most striking promotional tool available with iBuilt is “BizLiveChat”. It is an innovative tool to connect to your customers and derive maximum mileage out of your website.
“BizLiveChat” supports real time site monitoring. It allows you to know the pages being visited by a visitor, where the visitor came from and the time spent by the visitor on your site. It also provides for live chat with the visitors. You may prompt the visitors to chat through chat invitation that displays an eye catching graphic.
The only negative point about “BizLiveChat” is that it comes at an additional cost, though a nominal one.
The Smart Start Guide provides valuable insights for promoting your websites. These practical suggestions will go a long way in helping you successfully promote your own website.
iBuilt also provides for search engine submissions and generates good search listings. It also supports multiple traffic streams, targeted traffic, web directories, premium listings and building link popularity.
E-commerce tools
Rating: 5
E-commerce tools provided with iBuilt are simply impressive. The whole experience while performing tasks like adding products to your site, customizing your shopping cart, selecting payment methods and managing a merchant account, is rather pleasant. However, with so many features provided along with shopping cart, it took us a while for adding a product and setting up all options. Things got much better after initial product set-up. Sales reporting system, inventory control and quick search tool were very easy to configure and use. iBuilt also allows you to incorporate a wide range of payment options into your website.
The Advanced Features comprises of coupons, gift certificates, facility to track your orders and adding product search to your site. Here again the step-by-step approach comes in handy and makes the whole thing look very easy to comprehend. It also is capable of generating well structured reports that help you have better manage your store.
iBuilt shows concern even for the customer with the least amount of turn over also. In fact, multiple packages have been provided to suit the needs of most of the customers.
Other Features
Rating: 4.5
iBuilt comes with a large range of layouts for Web pages that you may add by simply clicking on the layout of your choice. By just filling in few fields, the page will be added to your Website. Several tools have also been provided for meeting your needs for customized items. Even the logo and banner can be customized with an option to include your own logo and banner.
You may even create feedback forms for collecting information from the visitors on your website. This helps greatly in improving visitor retention rate.
iBuilt aims at decreasing the total cost involved in website ownership by reducing to minimum the design and maintenance costs. And true to its commitment it provides a variety of plans with several options to meet the exact requirements of a client without adding overheads for features that are not required.
The security and privacy policy followed by iBuilt needs a mention. Firstly, the cookies used by iBuilt are not saved on your computer. Cookies are solely used as a means to allow you to edit your website.
For maximizing protection of personal information, iBuilt Site Manager utilizes state-of-the-art technology for protecting your data from misuse/alteration by unscrupulous unauthorized third parties. Currently, iBuilt uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol for protecting your data and securing your transactions. The SSL encrypts credit card number for its secured transmission over the Internet. In short the whole thing provides a security mechanism that is among the best in the business.
Support
Rating: 5
Ibuit's provides support through multiple channels in an easily accessible manner. It includes online support, telephone support and an elaborate documentation.
The telephone support provided by iBuilt for their domain name services, is quite competent and responsive. The downloadable user manual at http://techsupport.ibuilt.net/ was a little outdated but otherrwise quite satisfactory. All the necessary information has been provided and hardly anything has been left for further queries. In fact, the built in help documentation includes articles on almost every topic. A list of frequently asked questions has also been provided. In case your question is missing in documentation then you can submit a support ticket and get a response in less than one business day.
Overall Value
Rating: 5
Ibuilt can be easily credited as one most versatile website builder in market that is also very easy on the pocket. The 10-day no risk free trial offer will most probably attract you to try your hands on this new and easy to use website builder. You can choose to start with a website or a webstore.
The ten day trial provides plenty of time to get acquainted with all of their tools. The webstore option even allows you to place test orders, setup your merchant account and gateway, and get a feel for how it will all work once you start getting orders. After ten days, if you enjoy their tools as much as we have, you can activate your website and setup your domain name and email addresses. Pricing for iBuilt is quite reasonable considering that iBuilt has such extensive and highly advanced features. You may cancel your account at any time without any long term commitment.
Technical Details
Rating: 5
iBuilt provides a disk space of 350 meg with the most basic plan (Express Plan) and 500 meg with the high end plan (Express Store). It provides support for unlimited number of pages with all the plans, which is really incredible. POP email accounts range is from 20 to 50. On line mailing list manager supports 500 emails a month. Site search is available as upgrade with two lower end plans and is included in two upper end plans. Password protected pages are available as separate upgrades.
As far as web site features are concerned, it supports links to other sites, online form builder, site banner support, guest book, graphic bullet lists, polling boothcolour group box, event calendar, java applets and message board. Graphic design features include Flash intro builder, automatic menu builder, multi-level menus, Professional quality banners and Custom splash pages.
Site bulding components include Blogging system, image gallery, Image rotation; RSS feed browser, Groupboxes and page titles. This apart there are host of other technical aspects that make the builder an impeccable utility.
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