There are many reasons to use a website builder. Most of the time, it’s because it makes it possible for anyone to create their online presence. But it is also a practical and fast way for marketers as well as developers to quickly and efficiently set up a site.
The website builder Makeswift evolved from the former landing page builder Landing Lion. Landing Lion was a fast and no-code way for marketers to set up landing pages for their campaigns. It was doing great and landed customers such as Caterpillar and Cox Enterprises. But these were mostly technical teams and they weren’t satisfied with what they could do with it.
So, Landing Lion took the feedback to heart and made a pivot. Instead of concentrating on single pages primarily used for lead capture, it developed an entire content management solution. A tool that would allow everyone who works on a website — be it designers, developers, marketers, or copywriters to collaborate.
You don’t need web development skills to use Makeswift to set up your project, but you still get the power of an online design tool. And it helps if you know the web dev concept of the box model. A boon is that you get to collaborate in real-time with your team members. You won’t get locked out just because the designer in your team is tweaking the layout.
- Pros and cons of Makeswift
- Who is Makeswift for?
- How easy is Makeswift to use?
- Design and templates
- How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Makeswift?
- Integrations
- What marketing tools does Makeswift provide?
- Payment options
- Security
- Customer support
- Pricing
- Is Makeswift the right solution for you?
Pros and cons of Makeswift
You can sign up for a free account and only when you’re ready to publish do you need to subscribe. Although Makeswift includes a template for ecommerce sites, it doesn’t feature a shopping cart. It’s more like visual a frontend generator.
Pros
- Free forever account (as long as you don’t take your project live)
- Reasonable pricing
- Simple pricing structure
- Clean and easy to use interface with an almost flat learning curve
- Powerful yet intuitive drag-and-drop editor
- Collaborative working
Cons
- You can build almost all kinds of websites except online stores
- Only in English
- Not for complex and large projects
Who is Makeswift for?
No matter if you’re an independent marketer, in-house marketer, an agency, a designer, or a developer, Makeswift can help you realise web projects so much faster. And, the websites look good, even a cut above.
Of course, as a no-code website builder, it’s also a good place to start as a novice. Makeswift in general has a well-designed interface and its drag-and-drop editor is one of the easiest that I reviewed.
How easy is Makeswift to use?
The signup process is as painless as it gets. No handing in credit card details, no endless questions. As with many website builders, after signup, the first thing you do is to pick your template. Then you’re taken to your workspace. A short onboarding tour shows you around and ends with you picking a template for your first page.
Working in the Makeswift is a pleasant experience. It’s clean and intuitive. Working on a site is also straightforward with the intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Makeswift really keeps its promise to let you quickly build sites AND give you the power and detail of an online design tool. If you know a tool such as Figma, you’ll be all the faster.
Maybe it’ll take you a bit to get used to its approach of capturing leads because you need to set up and connect it to a database table yourself. But this gives you the freedom of making several forms for different goals all connecting to their own databases (and to their own Zapier workflow). Makeswift is similar to a frontend generator such as Startup by Designmodo or Mobirise but goes further. It makes the frontend files and gives you tools to capture information with a form and a database.
To speed up your building process, Makeswift has predesigned page sections such as a call to action or a footer that you can drag into your page. Once you’ve finished designing your site, it’s time for you to sign up for its paid plan, so that you can publish it.
Design and templates
You have the choice of about 20 templates that are all modern and mobile-ready. The templates are grouped in categories but only when you view the templates gallery on Makeswift’s website itself. If you’re in your workspace, the templates are listed in a (for me at least) random way.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Makeswift?
Even though an online store template is included, the backend for managing a store is not. Check out what’s needed for managing an online store.
Integrations
Since you can connect your account with Zapier, you get to integrate with a host of services. You can connect a service to your entire site with snippets, useful for analytics. If you need to integrate a service specifically on a page, you do that with embedded code.
What marketing tools does Makeswift provide?
SEO
You can easily add meta title, meta description, and meta keywords to each page.
Blogging
Makeswift behaves more like a visual frontend code generator. Hence, even if you can add meta tags to each page, it doesn’t have a content management system that dynamically generates a blog overview page out of the blog posts you write. You need to add the written blog posts manually to the blog post overview page.
Payment options
Even if Makeswift doesn’t feature a shopping cart you can still add a payment option such as a Paypal button via embedded code to a page.
Security
All sites hosted with Makeswi are secured with SSL certificates.
Customer support
Even on the free plan, you can access the chat support. You can also join the Makeswift team on Discord, reachable from Monday to Thursday 14:00 – 17:00 EST. If you can’t wait, you can check the searchable help centre.
Pricing
The pricing structure of Makingswift is refreshingly simple. You can experience how it is working with it for free and when you want to go live, you subscribe to its paid plan of $15.
Is Makeswift the right solution for you?
Makeswift is a great tool to validate your ideas because you can create a great looking website as fast as greased lightning. You can use it for your own projects or for your clients, as long as they’re not large and complex websites. It’s also not for running an online store.
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Original post here: Makeswift review – no-code website builder
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