Monday 5 December 2022

Umso review

In business, it’s all about ROI – Return On Investment. This includes everything you do in marketing such as launching a website. And remember, investment isn’t only about investing your funds, it’s also about how much time and cursing AKA hair pulling you spend to launch and maintain it.

Umso is a nifty website builder that gives you the best ROI. At first glance, it sounds just like what any other no-code or low-code website builder promises: Easily create a website with us. Or, create a professional looking site without coding. But it’s really faster, giving you top-notch results. You can make complete and professional sites that also load fast.

Umso is a very young service. It started life under the name Landen in April 2019 and got renamed to Umso in November 2020. The cool thing is that its founders Felix Gurtler and Simon Thomas have bootstrapped the service, so no “outside meddling”, just the team giving Umso’s customers the best service. You’ll see it in that the team behind Umso listens to feedback and realise requested features or iron out bugs. You can read what’s planned or in the making on its roadmap.

Pros and cons of Umso

Umso is a cloud-based website builder but instead of working with templates so that the resulting websites tend to look cookie cutter, it asks you questions about your product or style and then generates a unique site for you. Then, you can still add content just as you like.

Cloud-based providers mean that the tool is a hosted solution and you don’t need to take care of installing or updating software.

Pros

  • Transparent and fair pricing
  • Fast in every respect
  • Hassle-free and really easy to use
  • Account creation without credit card
  • You can decline to receive Umso’s marketing emails when you sign up
  • Fast and competent support team
  • No dark patterns that lure you into subscribing a higher plan

Cons

  • If there might be a drawback, it’s that Umso is still a new service – meaning that it may be buggy or lacking features you may want

Who is Umso for?

Umso clearly positions itself as the website builder for startups. Since it’s so fast and easy to use, I’d say it’s a smashing tool for everyone who wants to

address the customer problem first and build no more than what is needed to solve that problem
validate an idea, service, or a product
add a landing page to their user journey

You could think that with Umso you can only create informational sites. But it has multi-language support, a blogging tool, forms to capture information about your site vitiators, and you can also protect your entire site or individual pages with a password. If you work in a team, you can invite your team members to work with you on a project.

How easy is Umso to use?

To get a taste of Umso and play with its site generator, you don’t even need to create an account.

Umso editor makes adding content and customising a smooth and painless experience you’d want to repeat for your other projects

Of course, if you want to publish your site, you need an account. When you sign up after playing with the generator, Umso is smart enough to save your progress.

Create your account when you’re satisfied with your results in the generator

For Umso to have the best website building ROI, you can’t expect the same degree of freedom that you’d get with Webflow. But it works in its favour: you can still make a complete and professional website within hours, if not minutes. Something that would take days with Webflow.

Umso’s website was also created with Umso. You can see how powerful Umso is when you browse its website.

Umso design

Umso doesn’t rely on templates to make the site building experience nice and fast for you. Instead, it asks questions about your product and then lets you define your colour scheme and fonts.

Get a taste of the questions Umso asks to generate a unique site just for you

It also has cleanly designed building blocks that are still flexible enough to allow customisation. All elements are designed so that you can concentrate on your images (or videos) and the copy.

Umso integrations

Even though it’s still a new service, Umso comes with a small selection of helpful integrations. You can also embed code into the header sections or add meta tags.

Available integrations

What marketing and SEO tools does Umso have?

For tracking and analytics, connect your site with the built-in integrations. It also features a built-in yet privacy-minded analytics

SEO

Umso is built with SEO in mind and you don’t need to worry about it in any way. Sites created with Umso load fast and have clean code.

Blog

Although Umso is not a CMS in the traditional sense, it does come with a blogging tool. Its editor is just as easy to use as the rest of Umso. Note that it’s not a standalone feature but tied in with your site.

Forms

You don’t need to hunt for an extra tool to capture the contact data of your visitors, especially if you use Umso to build landing pages. You need to export them so that you can use your email marketing provider to send emails.

Payment options

Connect your site with Stripe and you’re are all set to receive payments.

Umso security

You can password-protect your entire site or select pages. HTTPS is not only for security but search engines also view a site with HTTPS favourably.

Umso customer support

You get to chat with Umso’s support team when you’re logged into the service. It has fast response times and provides outstanding support in every way.

Umso pricing

Umso has transparent and fair pricing, especially since its team regularly adds new features.

Umso prices

Umso prices

The prices are fair from a startup perspective, but especially if you weigh in how fast you’re up and running or how easy it’s to maintain sites built with Umso.

Is Umso the right tool for you?

If you care about having a unique website but don’t want to spend the time doing it up, Umso’s the way. It’s no exaggeration to say that it was super easy to set up and then add content. You’ll also like that out of the box, it’s useful coming with its own analytics and forms. It’s good to have Umso in your tool belt if you’re a startup or want to test a new concept or business.

That said, it’s not the right tool if you want to have a site with a complex structure or go wild with the design. It’s a great tool for simple sites.

If you need more options, say if you want to run a webshop or if you want to have a high degree of customisation, look at Shopify (for online stores) or Quarkly (great for designers and developers alike).



Original post here: Umso review

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