It could have been 5 tacos, but issues ate 4 of them
Leaving it here, in case this deal comes up again.
I got the deal back in March 2021, but only got around to using Webstars in November 2021 or so. I didn't check it out thoroughly during the deal being active, lulled by the hiper-positive reviews on AppSumo—my bad. But the more I used it, the more my initial rating (4, even 5 stars) dropped, and at least I can warn you of issues that might be a deal breaker for you.
The good:
- The editor is great (even if not always intuitive), and the ability to adjust the look on the mobile is even better. You can make some truly pretty websites with it. Seriously, you can make some truly pretty, functional websites with it. I love(d) it.
- There are some limitations, but you can usually work around them (no possibility to add your social icons to their limited collection can be circumvented to simply adding their images to your website and adding links to those images).
- Assigning an external domain was easy enough.
The meh:
- They don't tell you that you will have to buy an SSL certificate through them, and there's no way to install an external one.
- In the editor, sometimes the "undo" button doesn't work, so when something goes wrong and gets messed up, the only way might be force-quit the editor to undo the mess.
- No "remember me" at logging in. You have to log in every single time.
- Reporting seems unreliable. The notifications claim X people visited your website and even gives their locations/IP addresses, but when you click "full report", there are no visitors and no data at all.
The horrible:
- No GDPR compliance information of any sort - how it's done, is it on us, etc. There doesn't even seem a way to add "this website is using cookies" pop-up.
- "Blog" looks like an afterthought and is barely functional. It's missing basic control over the size of pictures (available options throw the layouts off or make pictures too big, etc.), no way to make a gallery when there's more pictures, and the text formatting relies on a context menu popping up when you highlight some text... which sometimes doesn't pop up.
- Comments in the blog section are useless: there's no way to reply to your clients' queries or notify them of a new comment, so if they ask a question, they will never know if you replied. Not good for business.
- Customer support. I was hesitant to put it under "horrible", because the first query was answered in about 24 hours which is acceptable. But the second one has been waiting for 9 days (counting from the automatic confirmation they got my email), and no reply yet.
Perhaps this deal is still good for you, for example if you don't have visitors from Europe (or don't care about the consequences not complying with GDPR), your blog is not a place to connect with your customers and serve them, and you don't mind silence from customer support.
If you're going to get it, though, devote time to test it thoroughly, so you don't waste money and time, and end up stuck trying to
Adam_WebStarts
May 9, 2024Sorry to hear you felt the overall experience was negative. I would like to point out the following.
1. The Appsumo deal includes SSL for your websites. So I'm not sure where the confusion was there. It's true you can't install a third-party SSL on our servers. We prevent that for security reasons.
2. You do remain logged into your account. However if you login a second time in the same browser you will be logged out of the first session. This is a best practice to ensure you don't accidentally overwrite your edits.
3. There are some discrepancies when it comes to the analytics. Your notifications will indicate a number of visitors but a deep dive in the analytics will show that some of them were invalid. This is due to bots pinging your website.
4. We do have a Cookie Consent banner that can be enabled under site settings. If you need a more advanced GDPR solution there are hundreds available online. So in a sense yes, things to do with the legality of your website are on you.
5. The blog is designed to focus on writing, similar to Medium. You have to select the text for example before the formatting options appear. You can reply to the comments but perhaps you're expecting it to work differently. Either way, we're always working toward improving.
6. Our customer service is via email and schedule phone calls. If you emailed on a Friday it's possible you didn't get a response until Monday. Skilled support people tend not to want to work off hours and we don't outsource support.