Simvoly has two options for starting your website-building journey. You can choose a template (as you would in nearly every other site builder) or use the Magic Website Wizard. We’ll discuss the non-magical tool first.
Simvoly’s themes use responsive design for flexible mobile presentation. They’re clean-looking themes categorized into nine groups, including Arts, Fashion, Personal Photography, Restaurant, and Services. Online Store templates have their own section. You can preview the responsively designed themes as they appear on PCs, phones, and tablets. After you choose a theme, you then create an online Simvoly account. This only requires an email, username, and password. The builder page opens with customizable, pre-populated content. To help you do this, a wizard walks you through the basics of adding pages and widgets and modifying overall site settings.
Simvoly works as a modern website builder should, letting you easily build and customize your pages with drag-and-drop functionality and mouse-over menus. A blue plus-sign icon in the top right lets you add new Pages to your sites, as does the first item in the floating left rail. The top big button on the left-side toolbar allows you to manage and add site pages. When you add a page, you can see and set its URL, choose a template (Home, Contact, About, Blank), password-protect the page, and specify a custom header. One limitation is that you can’t drag and drop page entries to change the navigation. You can set any page as the home page, but there are no nesting pages under others from the Pages menu. You can do this from the Website Settings panel, though adding subpages is less straightforward than in Wix and some other competing services.
As with Squarespace, Simvoly lets you add content in blocks you access by clicking the on-hover Add Block “+” buttons within the editor. The next button over is Widgets. It lets you add images, text areas, maps, code blocks, and even blank areas. You can drag and drop these sections to multiple places in the editor space. Whenever your mouse hovers over a block, Edit, Move, and Delete buttons appear. If you click on text, you get all your text formatting options. You can easily divide your site into up to five columns, each with an adjustable width. You can undo your last action, but there isn’t a full multiple-undo capability like that in Duda. You’ll just have to rely on backups.
The next left rail item is Global Styling Settings, a single place to edit your content’s colors, fonts, and sizes. Then there’s Funnels, which are marketing features allowing you to generate customer leads. There’s also a general settings section, where you can set your favicon, manage domains, and add custom code if you’re a web designer.
Overall, Simvoly isn’t as flexible as PageCloud’s full WYSIWYG editor, but the ability to move columns makes it slightly more flexible than what Squarespace offers. However, Simvoly lacks third-party widgets, such as ones for Mailchimp or Shopify. Your only workaround is embedding custom code. Unlike Duda, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, Squarespace, and Wix, Simvoly lets you easily switch themes.
Using the Website Settings tab, you can choose whether your site should fill the full width of the browser or stay contained in a fixed box. You can also change the header site navigation menu and upload a custom favicon, that tiny icon that appears in the browser tab.
Awkwardly, getting a custom domain requires contacting the Simvoly staff, rather than simply applying online. We also prefer website builders that let us fill out a short form for business details, such as name, address, phone number, and contact email. Not having a form isn’t a deal breaker, but its inclusion speeds up the building process. You can also hook up your Simvoly site to a domain you’ve previously registered with another website hosting service.
