As with just about every other DIY online website builder, you get started by selecting a template. The designs are stylish, with many featuring full-page images and minimal navigation. However, Ucraft has a little more than 70 templates in total, while Wix has more than 2,000. Once you choose a template, you must select a domain name. Free sites get domains in the form of yoursitename.ucraft.ai. Ucraft’s AI tool, called Ucraft Copilot, generates layouts, designs, and descriptive text based on your prompts.
Starting my testing with a free account, I discovered that most customization options, including the visual editor, are not available to free account holders. That’s unfortunate; Weebly and Wix’s free versions provide nearly all the same features as their paid counterparts, aside from e-commerce and large storage and bandwidth options.
With a premium account, you can use the usual page design elements: Images, galleries, titles, paragraphs, videos, icons, logos, buttons, and social buttons. I like that there’s a search field within the widgets, blocks, and overlays panel to quickly find items. Most elements let you add hover and load effects, such as slide-ins and reveals. Ucraft’s logo builder is a helpful feature that sets the service apart from many of its rivals. With it, small businesses without the resources to hire a professional designer can whip up a logo in a few easy steps.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
The interface, on the other hand, is a bit clunky. You can drag and drop site elements, but you’re limited in terms of how and where you can place them on the page. Everything snaps into predetermined grid spots, but I wasn’t always sure where an element would move while I dragged it. However, section dividers guide you as you drag elements. It’s not as intuitive as Duda or Wix.
Separate from the building page is the Designer Tools page, where you adjust title fonts and change layout options (the latter lets you adjust the space between elements and blocks). Double-clicking text allows you to adjust its font, size, spacing, and color.
You can upload multiple JPGs from your PC or select images from a curated, searchable collection of free stock photography. Ucraft helpfully saves all your uploaded photos, allowing you to reuse them elsewhere on the site (but not on any other Ucraft sites you may have). Your options for video embedding are Vimeo and YouTube, though you can also upload an MP4 file.
Ucraft features basic photo editing tools to help you tweak the brightness, contrast, and color saturation of your images. You can crop images, choose load animations, and rotate and scale images.
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The website builder provides a range of quality options for adding pages to your site. You start doing so from the Dashboard’s Pages button. The overall template you chose determines what pages are initially included in your site. Of course, you can add to and delete these, but you may not see page types like Store when you add a page. You can, however, duplicate a template page or just create and customize a blank one. You can also password-protect individual pages for security or paywall purposes.
Ucraft’s templates also include blogging templates. The blog maker lets you save a post as a draft, schedule, apply tags, add categories, and assign multiple authors. You can also enable comments, but that requires a Disqus account. After you create a post, it appears on your Articles Dashboard page.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
Unfortunately, Ucraft makes your site live by default as soon as you start editing it. I prefer builders that let you save a version before making it live, such as Wix. But you can set your site to Offline in Site Settings to avoid this. The Settings page also lets you password-protect, set a favicon for, and cache your site. The last option only works for custom domains and results in faster page loading. But you must remember to clear the cache when you update the site. A versioning feature is tied to this caching, allowing you to test different site content on your custom domain versus your Ucraft.com subdomain.
Please note that at the time of this review, Ucraft is migrating existing sites to its updated Ucraft V2 platform. As a result, you may experience occasional hiccups, such as the brief server errors I encountered while creating a new site.
