The drag-and-drop website builder Readymag styles itself as a design tool that lets you create websites without coding. When you head over to its website, you’re greeted with just one word: design.
Readymag is an online design tool intended to help creative professionals (hence the word design) to easily create microsites, portfolios, presentations, digital magazines, or landing pages.
The tool comes with layouts for different screen sizes, a wide range of font options as well as freely usable images of Unsplash.
Pros and cons of Readymag
As a website builder, Readymag takes care of web hosting and gives you the tools (a drag-and-drop editor) to design and build your project.
Pros
- Forever free plan, if you don’t want to host on your own domain
- Easy to understand and easy to use
- The drag-and-drop editor gives you a lot of control over your design
- Beautiful, mobile-ready templates
- Huge library of fonts, images, and icons
- Reasonably priced
- Collaboration with your teammates is possible as you can share your projects
Cons
- No backup function
- Not for larger projects
- Somewhat limited templates selection
Who is Readymag for?
If you don’t need to regularly update your website or anything that has a complicated structure, but want to let your creativity reign free, Readymag is an interesting option. Particularly, if you know a design application such as Indesign.
As Readymag doesn’t require coding skills but is design-centric, it lends itself to creative professionals such as designers or photographers. It has built-in animations, a plethora of fonts that you can fine-tune for your typography. You also have access to freely usable images of Unsplash and a ton of icons.
No matter if you work alone or in a team, you can share your projects with your teammates and give them access to edit your projects.
How easy is Readymag to use?
The sign-up process is simple, you key in your name, email, and password. That’s it. No credit card required. You can also choose to create an account with Google or Facebook. Once your account is created, you’re welcomed by the getting started guide.
Since its editor doesn’t look like the run-of-the-mill site builder, going through the introductory tour will help you hit the ground running. You’ll quickly see how uncluttered and cleanly laid everything is in the interface.
Creating your page is very easy. It’s just a matter of learning what the icons mean. These have tooltips to prompt you. You add widgets such as a button, text field, a form, or even custom code to your page. You have a preview that shows how your site looks on mobile and desktop. When your site is ready, click publish.
Design and themes
If you’re coming from other website builders, you might feel intimidated by a white layout with nothing on it. But fret not. You can add beautifully designed and mobile-ready templates to your project and customise them.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Readymag?
You can add an online store through a widget for Ecwid or Stripe. This widget is only available if you’ve subscribed to a paid plan. Or you can embed a third party shopping cart such as Shopify or Gumroad (although Ecwid and Stripe are also third party services).
Since the shopping cart is handled by a third party, you’ll be managing your online store there and not on Readymag.
Integrations
You can add social media via the provided widgets. As you can add custom code, you can add any service or product that offers an embedded code or widget.
What marketing tools does Readymag provide?
Out of the gates, you can add your Google Analytics account to your projects.
SEO
Each page has an editor for you to add your page titles meta description, keywords, and custom URL, although that’s only available in the paid plans.
Blogging
Blogging means you’re updating your website with new content regularly. Of course, you can brute-force it together by adding a new page to your project, but that’s cumbersome.
Payment options
The payment gateways are provided by third party ecommerce services.
Security
All your projects are encrypted with an SSL certificate.
Customer support
Interestingly, the help centre is translated into Spanish and Russian, if English isn’t your first language, although the interface itself is in English. When you’re browsing the help centre, you can support the customer support via the support icon in the lower right-hand corner.
Pricing
No matter if you’re just trying out the service, are a one-man team or working in an agency, you find a plan suitable for you. Note that the free plan has the Readymag branding.
Is Readymag the right solution for you?
It’s obvious that Readymag went to great lengths to create an easy-to-use site builder. Clearly, it’s catering to the creative professionals and not the web developers.
It’s also not the right choice to build a fully functioning business website including a blog or an online store, except if you accept to manage your store in another tool.
But, it’s great to great landing pages, an online presentation, or a simple portfolio that showcases your talent.
If you liked reading about Readymag, I’d be really grateful if you could create a link to it on your website.
Original post here: Readymag review
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