Mr Site (PC/Mac)

Just built one this weekend and am very pleased. Its looks much more professional than the last build your own website company I used, which was double the price, plenty of options and extras to play with and very easy to use. There is even an online forum to talk to other web builders. You can keep it quite simple using their templates or if confident design your own and you can update it whenever you want. I think it's a bargain price!

I'm going to buy another one to forward my other site to as it now pales in comparison.

Highly recommended

We came across the mr site website last year when our interior design company in Cheshire had just begun. We found the package was easy to use and produced professional looking results in no time at all. It allows us to constantly update the content and track the number of people who visit the site which is currently over 300 visitors a week. The business has just expanded to the west midlands region due to our continuing success and mr site has allowed us to change and adapt accordingly.
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A definite recommendation,
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I started using Mr Site about 3 or so years ago. For a new startup, it's a really great product as it allows you to get your products on the web and start taking payments straight away.

You pick a domain name, choose from one of many templates (bound to be something you like), do a little personalization and start adding content to your pages. It's not the most intuitive of interfaces, but it's not THAT hard to navigate and you soon get to know where everything is. My first draft was visible on the net in about 2 hours.

It has, however, reached the end of its usefulness for me, and here's why:

1. Mr Site support is rubbish. You're lucky to get a reply to any queries so I find that the Unofficial Mr Site forum is the best place to get help.

2. No clean URLs. By that I mean, the web page names are dynamically generated (1.html, 2.html) which is useless for SEO. I don't believe it can be that hard to add a field to the page creation screen telling it what name you want for the page. It could even generate it based on the Title tag you give it. This is the single feature they could implement which would make me stay with them. Yet, when I request it, they don't even have the decency to reply.

3. Google Analytics: They have finally provided a google analytics widget option, allowing you to add your google analytics code to your pages. Previously, you had to create your shop pages, then manually edit each one to add it. HOWEVER, without clean URLs, this information is useless. If you add a page in the middle, pushing all subsequent ones up (e.g. 3.html becomes 4.html), your Google Analytics data is WORTHLESS because the stored stats don't match the new page names. GA does allow you to add special code to label each page, but then you're back in the boat of manually editing your shopping pages. This is dangerous and unstable as it can either not take and you have to do it twice OR it stops your pages working altogether AND you have to readd it every time you regenerate your shop page. Gets really tedious, really fast.

4. No discount codes.

5. No product categories. If I want a "Just In" page or "Featured for July" page, you have to manually add the product twice then delete them later from one of the pages.

6. No customer accounts or account types (e.g. Gold customer, standard customer)

7. It only works with Paypal. Mr Site themselves use Nochex, but they don't support it on our pages. Some of my customers refuse to use Paypal, so they have to send cheques.

8. Shop pages don't have table options (e.g. displaying products in a 3x5 grid). Each page shows all products scrolled down the page. If you have 100 items, the page gets REALLY long. It just looks amateurish. I was able to do something similar on my home page, but had to write the HTML myself. I'm not comfortable doing that on a shopping cart page.

9. Max 99 pages, so even if I wanted to create my own html tables with thumbnails of the products (really easy), they don't give you enough pages to display all your items on their own page.

10. Pages are portrait only. Look at any shopping cart (amazon) and they are usually landscape. Portrait pages makes your shop look like a blog with some products on it.

11. Other ecommerce products give you the ability to hide a product. Can't do that here.

Having said that:

1. They have finally added alt tag functionality for images, which helps SEO.

2. They ARE making improvements all the time, but with no idea of their timescales for certain features, the temptation to jump ship is just too much.

3. What do you expect for £35 a year?

4. As you get more au fait with web development, write your own pages and use them as a really cheap host.

5. Apart from a period a few years ago where my images refused to show when clicked on and shocking support services, I've had no other service issues ( downtime, lag, bugs ) with them.

Summary: good for startups to get a web presence while they look for something better, which I am currently doing.