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iRun Website Builder - Review Rating: 3 
irun is a Website builder that is designed to suit the geeks. This utility can defiantly boast of exquisite features; however it’s advantages at times tends to be overshadowed by its inherent complexity. Understanding the different options that are present on the interface takes a great deal of time and patience. The editor is superb and the design templates are lively. It however lacks a good range of customization options as compared to its rivals. Further you will need to do the Website promotion yourself as it lacks a suitable enabling mechanism. irun is equipped with versatile and robust e-commerce strategies. You can add multiple products to the store with a single click. It’s a sure winner in case you are looking to make a good commercial website loaded with sleek functionalities. Managing newsletters becomes a piece of cake with its well thought out features. You can add a sub-page and thus create menus. On the downside the monthly package price is too high and Help articles are too few for ones liking. You are forced to view high-bandwidth flash tutorials.
Website made with irun
Thumbs up
· Facility to add sub-pages
· Professional and attractive Website design templates
· Fully functional shopping cart with Web store
· Multiple payment options
· Sophisticated editor
· Advanced Website statistics
· Free promotional tools and free credits
· No advertisements
· Free 30-day trial offer
Thumbs down
· Confusing button names
· Very expensive Website custom design services
· High monthly fees
· Very few help topics and articles
· No search engine submission
· Preview opens in a separate window
User Friendliness
Rating: 2.5
As far as user friendliness is concerned, it deserves an average score. It is annoying to find both the Try Now and Buy Now links missing from the home page. They appear only when you click the Need a Website link. Setting up an account, on the contrary, is very easy. However, usage of large font in the Website 101 section and a pop-up window that asks you to active your account on the launch page will put you off.
Before you start editing your Website, it asks you to select your industry and then offers design options. It also shows the pages that will be created. You can add and remove pages with simple clicks. This is an excellent example of building a site as per the user requirements. Writing text for your home page is a very difficult process. For editing other pages, you will have to do a lot of scrolling up and down. Otherwise, the interface looks balanced and consistent throughout.
Scrolling Required to Edit Pages
The preview opens in a separate window. Most of your time will be spent in switching back between preview and edit windows. It is difficult to decipher the meaning of most of the links on the left frame at first glance. The ability to easily set up a store and integration with eBay, however, adds up to its usability.
Designing tools
Rating: 4
irun has a total of 180 design templates. The best part about these templates is that all of them look very lively. The templates consist of very high-resolution images. What is surprising is that there is very little you can do as far as customizing a template is concerned. You can only change the header image. There is no way of changing the global color settings. You cannot have an image in the background. You can put a logo of your business though. This is definitely a great plus point. However, you can only position the logo on the top left. An option to set the alignment option for the logo should have been provided.
irun gives you lots of options to layout your new page. You can choose from text only layout, top left alignment, top right alignment, left to right alternate, right to left alternate, and hours of operation.
Page layout options
irun has its own collection of 1000 good-looking professional photos. Adding a photo from the collection is a breeze.
Editing tools
Rating: 4
irun has an exclusive editor. It contains most of the icons that are found on MS Word toolbars. There are heading levels from 1 to 6. The fonts, though, are very limited. You can only choose from Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Tahoma, Times New Roman, and Verdana. You can change the font size and font color. The background color does not work, sadly.
There are icons to bold, italicize, and underline the text. You can undo and redo your actions. The alignment options are also present. You can make a numbered and a bulleted list. You can add hyperlinks. In addition, you can also add bookmarks. There is also an icon for adding a flash file. However, there are no flash files on the server. Therefore, you first need to create them using another program. You can also add a table, move it, and resize it. There is ample number of special characters to choose from. You can cut, copy, and paste text. However, what is unique about irun is that you can paste directly from MS Word. Another interesting feature is the ability to insert a smiley.
MS-Word like editor
If you are more comfortable doing coding, you can directly edit the HTML code. However, you will find that the editor is very small. It should have been designed much wider.
Promotional tools
Rating: 2.5
You will expect a Website builder to at least submit your site to search engines. However, surprisingly, irun does not submit your site to any of the search engines. Therefore, you will have to do all the promotion yourself. A list of informative articles on search engine optimization appears upon selecting the Site options. These articles appear in small pop-up windows. Be prepared do a lot of scrolling if you want to know about optimization. You can change the Website title, description, and keywords. No help is given regarding how to write description and enter keywords.
Search engine optimization
You can also change the tile, description, and keywords for each page by going to Advanced Options.
E-commerce tools
Rating: 4
The best part about irun is that you can have multiple categories of products within a single store. You can upload a separate logo for your store. It also allows you to specify privacy and return policies. You can easily switch between pages of a catalog. If your goods are going to be shipped to different countries, you can specify different shipping and tax zones. The thing that you will find interesting here is the option to specify a promo code which the customer can enter at checkout. You can collect payments through multiple gateways, including PayPal. There is a feature to automatically list all your Web store products on eBay.
Adding and modifying a new product in the store is easy. You can also display whether the item is available in the stock or not. However, the negative point is that you can have only one image for the product.
The shopping cart is very easy to use. It gives you the option of changing the quantity after you have added an item to the shopping cart. However, there is no option to sort the products. In addition, it has all the buttons that you find in a popular Web store. What you will definitely like about the button is the button to empty the cart.
Handy shopping features
Other Features
Rating: 4.5
A great advantage of using irun is that you can view your Web site statistics using the same toolbar that you use to build your Website. Every detail of the site visitors is captured. You can customize statistics as per your requirements.
irun automatically adds Back, Print Page, Email Page, and Back to Top links. This is a great value addition and it increases visitor retention rate as your visitors can perform all their tasks while not moving away from your Website. The presence of Search facility allows your visitors to search your entire Website and scan for information. All top-level links are also repeated at the bottom of every Web page. However, irun should have gone a step further. It should have allowed users to modify or remove these links.
Using a gallery page, you can have a page with thumbnail images. Clicking a thumbnail pops up the full size image. However, you cannot change the layout of gallery page. The Press News Releases page allows you to have a page containing multiple press releases, sorted by date. You can inform others about the happenings in your organization by adding an Events Calendar page. The Downloads page makes it possible for you to offer your visitors files for downloading. You can collect feedback from your visitors by using a Contact Page & Form. This comes with an autoresponder. You can create a poll and write your own questions and answers. You can also send newsletters to your visitors
Multiple features using pages
Support
Rating: 2
There is a 2MB irun tour and some video tutorials. Although there is a toll-free number for contacting customer support, you will observe that irun has not paid proper attention to really help their customers. The greatest proof of this is that the help icon is in a small font and is tucked away at the bottom.
The getting started guide is not really a getting started guide. It lacks the familiar sequence of steps. It looks more like a library of articles. Some of the links on the getting started guide take you to the edit page rather than offering you any help. In addition, there are small articles at few places. There is hardly any topic-specific help. Whatever topics are there, they have been written in a small font.
Support is limited
If you want to raise a ticket, you can do so by filling a form. You write your query and you get the answer within 24 hours. One good news is that irun has just opened a new support and development center and response time is expected to improve.
Overall Value
Rating: 3
At $39.95 per month, irun is expensive when compared to other Website builders. There are no 6-month or yearly packages. So the price is definitely not competitive. However, the advantage is that this is an all-inclusive price. You do not have to pay a cent extra. The set-up fees are nil and you have the flexibility to cancel if not satisfied. In addition, you get 10 e-mail addresses for free. This will definitely benefit a small business with few employees. If you have already bought a domain name, you can redirect your visitors from the domain name provided by irun to that domain name. You can make full use of your investments in irun by setting up a store. There is a greater chance of your products selling because they can easily come under eBay auctions.
Another great value proposition of irun is that it comes with a no obligation 30-days free trial period. Many other Website builders do not offer such kind of trial periods. In addition, during the trial period also, you can set up a store complete with shopping cart and see its working.
irun also offers custom Website design services. However, with its price starting at $750, you would like to hire your own designer rather than going in for this exorbitant price.
Technical Details
Rating: 4
There is no limit as to the number of pages your Website can have. However, your Website cannot occupy more than 100MB of space. The monthly data transfer that can take place on the Website is 5GB. Your online store can have a maximum of 500 products. The shopping cart is fully integrated with the store. Although the store accepts payments through multiple options, it handles payments in US dollars only. You do not have to pay any transaction fees. Your site does not get automatically listed on search engines. There is unlimited and free customer support. Even trial users can make use of free customer support. You can get a wide variety of reports on your Website statistics. You can buy a hosted or licensed solution if you want to become a reseller. With a hosted solution, you host your customers’ Websites on irun server. You do not have to spend anything on infrastructure and logistics. With a licensed solution, all your customers’ Websites reside on your own server. However, you need to spend money on setting up your server. The advantage is that you can make your own resellers.
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