Conclusion:
Yola Silver has wonderful Customer Support and is incredibly easy to use. The builder scored 5 out of 5 stars in both these categories, making it the highest ranked builder we reviewed. Yola’s builder has an intuitive layout and detailed guides that allow you to get started extremely quickly. They provide excellent customer service, including 24/7 phone support, which we found to be very knowledgeable. The only problem we found was that it was difficult to edit or resize content blocks within the website builder.
Ease of Use
Yola’s Yola Silver website builder received 5 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. The builder provides high-quality guidance when getting started through a very detailed setup wizard that instructs you on how to set up your website and use their builder. The builder also has a simple layout, which makes it easy to use and find the features you need. Yola provides both direct editing and drag-and-drop features that make it easy to customize your site. You can easily add a content block by dragging a widget representing the content type to wherever you want it to be positioned on the page. Placing a photograph is done in the same way, and you have the choice of uploading your own or purchasing one of 11,000,000 images available from Yola’s partner site Fotolia.
Yola provides over 100 templates to assist you with page creation, but you can also choose a blank template and design your own site by adding and formatting content blocks from scratch. If you’re familiar with HTML, you can edit the HTML code of any of the templates for more customization. We found the flexibility of Yola’s website builder to be above average, as it is rather easy to add content blocks and upload files. The only problem we found was that it isn’t easy to edit content blocks or resize them by clicking and dragging them. Yola allows you to insert your site title, description, and keywords, and provides a metatag editor for the purpose of optimizing your sites for search engines. Yola also lets you easily add several types of content such as photo galleries, YouTube videos, an MP3 player, Flash modules, and more.
Customer Support
Yola received 5 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. Phone support and email support are available, and their phone support is accessible 24/7. However, they do not offer live chat support. They provide high-quality customer support through the variety of support avenues available. FAQs and user forums are available for those seeking additional information as well as extremely helpful tutorials and searchable knowledgebases. We found their phone support to be high quality, as their support techs were very knowledgeable and answered all but one of our questions about the functions of their website builder correctly.
Account Features
Yola provides an unlimited number of email accounts related to your domain (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com) for a fee of $9.96 per year. Upon account creation, Yola provides you with Facebook advertising credits so you may quickly begin promoting your site. Yola provides Privacy Protection from the WHOIS database for free if you decide to use the free domain registration that they provide. The WHOIS database is a publicly searchable database with information about the registrants of domain names. Keeping information like your name, address, telephone number, and email address out of this database helps protect you against unwanted marketing, spam, and identity theft. When Privacy Protection is enacted, Yola will keep this information private by replacing your contact information with theirs.
Pricing
Yola Silver costs $9.95 per month with an option to purchase an annual plan and pay an upfront fee of $99.95. When you purchase the annual plan, Yola will give you two months free lowering your total monthly cost to $8.33. Yola includes with your monthly fee a few e-commerce features, such as the ability to post a Product Catalog that presents any goods or services you want to sell through your site. Yola also provides a 30-day money-back guarantee so that you may fully test their service before you commit to an entire year. Another option for testing their services free of charge is the Yola Free account. A Yola Free account must be hosted on a subdomain of www.yola.com (e.g. yourdomain.yola.com) instead of your own domain (e.g. www.yourdomain.com). Some services allow you to point a domain that you have registered with someone else to their server, but the Yola Free account must remain on a subdomain of www.yola.com and cannot be pointed to another server.
Upgrades
Yola offers two plan upgrades. Yola Gold includes the same number of sites with more storage, directory submissions, SEO assistance, and 180 days of premium customer support for $19.95 per month. You can also have their web designers create your entire website by going with Yola Premier for a one-time fee of $499.95.
