1&1 MyWebsite Plus review

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1&1’s MyBusiness Website was launched roughly two years ago and offered a supremely easy way for small businesses to get a web presence without forking out for a custom-designed site.

Now, 1&1 has updated the bundle and renamed it MyWebsite. As before, you go to http://mybusiness.1and1.co.uk and sign up for a trial. This has been extended from five to 30 days so you can test the service out before committing to a monthly fee.

Little has changed in terms of choosing a site template and design: you enter your business type and select the closest match from a list of 120 sectors. Whether you run a restaurant, bakery, a car dealer or an opticians, you’ll find a template to match.

The beauty of the pre-built sites is that they have a sensible structure with pre-filled text that should need minimal editing to tailor it for your business. Unless your business is particularly obscure, most of the work will be done. Since you enter your business name and address during sign up, these details appear on the site automatically, along with a Google map of your location.

The second trick is that the site couldn’t be simpler to change and update. Everything is done in a web browser, and you need only click on a page element to edit it, or add a new one. Editing the navigation menu and adding new pages is equally easy – even for complete novices. You can even change the entire look of your site by selecting a different template from the menu. Be warned, though, that some title banners won’t translate to other designs (they get cut off), so make sure you don’t inadvertently save such a change to a live site.

So what’s new? One of our main criticisms of the original package was the lack of a way to sell products via the site. This has now been rectified, but e-commerce is available only in this Plus package and the Premium version (which costs £36 per month including VAT).

The Plus package also gives you a choice of 30 additional site designs, optimisation of viewing on mobile devices and a newsletter tool for sending out information to customers. You also get Facebook and Twitter integration plus RSS feeds for industry-specific news and a guest book for customer feedback. There’s access to an image library with 12,500 free-to-use professional quality photos, plus integration with iStockPhoto’s library where images have a one-off fee of £7.

As with MyBusiness Site previously, you can still add other objects and elements such as YouTube videos, links, forms and more. Elements can be reordered on the page by clicking the up/down arrows, so you can customise your site to your liking. The only limitation is that you need an internet connection: there’s no offline editing.

The e-commerce addition will be of most interest to any business wanting to sell products directly to customers without resorting to eBay. This should provide a more professional look, especially if you have good product photography. Like eBay, the main payment method is PayPal, although you can provide options to pay by cash in advance, cash on delivery or by invoice.

As with rival offerings such as the online shop in Serif’s WebPlus X5, the implementation in MyWebsite is very basic. You must list items individually, even if there are variations such as size and colour, as there are no options. It’s possible to create search keywords for each product so customers can find them, but this can be time consuming. Another slight problem is that there’s no way to generate a concise list of products for customers to browse through – you simply see the each product’s description, photo, price and an ‘Add to shopping cart’ button. Plus, by default, each description is truncated until the customer clicks the Display more>>>> link, which looks untidy.

Overall, MyWebsite is a decent package for small businesses, but the improvements aren’t quite as good as we’d hoped for. If you’re serious about selling products online, an eBay shopfront will be easier to manage. You’ll get a more professional look by linking to a third-party online shop such as 1&1’s own eShop. Had MyWebsite included eShop as part of the package, we’d have liked it a whole lot more.

Written by

Jim Martin

Jim Martin is an editor at IDG UK and holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Kent. Known for his product reviews and testing, Jim’s portfolio includes Tech Advisor and Computer Shopper.

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