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Editor’s Notes:
Vista has now partnered with Wix to offer its users a more comprehensive (but still free) website building experience. For more information about WIX you can read our full WIX review.
VistaPrint is a popular brand known for its custom printing products: business cards, calendars, invitations, posters, photo gifts, t-shirts and more. The company also provides some interesting digital services, including what it hopes is one of the best website builder platforms to enable anyone to create their own professional website.
Plans and pricing
VistaPrint has three main plans available, all of which you have to pay for. You can test any plan for free for 30 days, but after that you’ll need to choose a plan and start paying monthly or annually. All plans are cheaper when purchased annually.
The Personal plan costs $2.81 per month when you sign up for the annual plan. This includes access to the Vistaprint subdomain, a library of free stock images, an SSL certificate, and access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. This plan works great for creating a website to showcase your resume, or share a personal portfolio or blog.
The Get Professional plan is perfect for small businesses looking for help with their SEO. The plan costs $10.12 per month when paid annually. This includes SEO, website activity reports, an email address, and optimization tools for your own domain.
The GET PAID plan has more features than any of the other plans and is surprisingly affordable. When you use the annual subscription, it costs $14.06 per month. This plan includes everything that other plans have but also has e-commerce capabilities.
You can create an online store, add shopping carts, and even have room for a donation area. In this project you need to sell products and services online or market your business to a wide audience. This plan allows you to add unlimited products to your website. You can change your plans (downgrade or upgrade) at any time.
Interface
VistaPrint’s interface is clear and simple, and it’s easy to compare plans and see what you’re getting. Choose the most appealing option and you’re prompted to hand over your contact details: name, email and physical address, and your phone number, or just log in if you already have a Vistaprint account.
The VistaPrint design process begins by choosing a template. These are organized into 24 industries, many of which are further broken down into sub-categories, which at first look very impressive. You don’t just find the animal and pet care industry, for example: subcategories include boarding kennels and catteries, animal grooming, dog breeders, pet sitting and dog walking, pet supply stores, pet training and veterinary.
Features
The editor enables building sites from pre-formatted content blocks rather than the more common individual widgets. Choose Content > Add Text, for example, and you’ll be presented with no fewer than 16 layouts, including icons, captions, images, as values, in boxes, grids, and more. Drag your preferred option onto the page, the editor shows where it can be placed, and when you release it, the block takes the full width of the page at that point.
Other content blocks include headers, images, videos, a calendar, social links, a contact form, a web store, and more. These cover the basics, but little else, and have little integration with other services. For example you can display a bar with links to your social media accounts, but there’s no option to embed content like a tweet or Facebook post.
This block-based approach makes building a site very easy. You don’t need to drag around a layout widget, set up multiple rows or columns, insert whatever text or images you need and set their properties manually, because the content block has everything you need.
Competition
There are many other website builders available. Wix, Squarespace, and Webnode are just a few options. If you compare Vistaprint (only website builder) with other web hosts in the market, it is definitely a web host for beginners. However, Vistaprint offers more services than web building that many other web hosts don’t – you can create your own business cards, put your company logo on t-shirts, or personalize your website. The wide variety of marketing tools Vistaprint provides for your business makes it very different from other website builders.
Final thoughts
VistaPrint Website Builder is great for anyone looking to build a basic site. For anyone still in the learning phase of website building, you can easily get started without investing much time. You can even use a free 30-day trial to help decide if it’s the right platform for you.
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