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It seems like every high-volume Web development firm is coming out with a DIY online website-building service. I've tested more than a dozen, and there are easily a score more waiting to be reviewed. Moscow-based uCoz's targets Web developers rather than average Joes who don't know an anchor tag from a type declaration. For us mere mortals, the company offers uKit, a drag-and-drop site builder for non-developers, and the product I'll focus on here. uKit is a good-looking modern builder of fully responsive sites, but it's one of the more restrictive when it comes to positioning page objects. Also, mobile site customization options and integrated statistics reporting are missing here.

Getting Started

On the uCoz.com home page, the Personal choice takes you to the developer-targeted uCoz builder I mentioned earlier, which caused me considerable confused when I started this review. You can avoid this by pointing your browser to ukit.com rather than uCoz.com. Pricing for uKit is quite reasonable: For $4 per month, the Premium plan gives you unlimited pages and sites, no uCoz ads, support, and a mobile-friendly site. The Premium Plus level, for $8 per month, adds live chat support and premium designs. The Pro level ($12 per month) lets you add custom HTML code to your site. Those prices are well below what you pay for most services, such as Squarespace($12–$40 per month) or WebStarts ($9.78–$39.98).

To start with uKit, you answer a short questionnaire, choosing a site type (online store, education, personal, entertainment, or portfolio), your computer knowledge level, and how much you want to spend, from free to "as much as it takes."

When you get to the uKit page to start building your site, you have a template choice that looks a lot like those you see with Wix and other DIY site builders. There are 37 categories to choose from, including some very specific options like Nail Design and Tattoo Artist. You can filter themes by primary color or by lightness and darkness of the design. The template previews also show you how the sample site looks on a smartphone screen. Note that the uCoz developer-level service offers fewer templates, and less modern-looking ones, at that.

The next step is choosing your site address on the service's ulcraft.com domain. At this point in the process, there isn't an option to register a custom domain name—you're stuck with a domain in the form of [sitename].ulcraft.com for now. You then go through a short series of questions asking for your business name, address, and social accounts. Finally, you find yourself in the clearly designed, modern, attractive site-building interface.

Editing Your Site

As with DudaOne, a left-side toolbar shows a grid of tiles with options for adding elements to your template page. Tabs atop this toolbar let you switch between Widgets and Blocks. In the latter, you get the standard Heading, Text, Image, Button, and more. Even more choices hide under sections called Structure (separators and spaces), Content (cards, price lists, tables, and more), Media, Contact, and Social. One convenience in uKit's toolbar is a Search space at the bottom, a handy way to get to the widget you want, and one I haven't seen in many competitors. Missing, however, is a Help button within the site-builder interface.

When you hover the mouse cursor over any page element, controls for it appear at its top. If it's a Block, you can tap a gear icon to change its structure, for example, from an object with padding (a margin of blank space) to one that fills the whole screen width.

The Soundcloud widget lets you enter a song URL and have it play on your site, but you can't set it to auto-play. The video widget can play Vimeo or YouTube movies on your page, but you can't upload your own private videos to uKit for playing. The SlideShare element lets you display PowerPoint files, PDFs, and Word documents on your site. A few other third-party widgets in the sidebar include LiveChat, MailChimp, and LiveAgent. Social icons offer good control of your accounts and services, but their colors are restricted by the template you choose. Another option is to drop in an AddThis widget, which uses the standard colors of the various social networks. You can also add feed panels from Facebook Pages, as well as Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts.

This decent choice of widgets aside, uKits doesn't offer a gallery of third-party widgets the way Wix does. This is particularly limiting because uKit requires you to have a Pro level account to add any HTML snippets to your site.

The service conforms tightly to responsive design standards, so the placement of your page elements is restricted. You can't just place objects exactly where you want them anywhere on the page. By default, they also take up the full page width, but after some experimentation I found a way to add columns, by dropping items onto the side of the current page object. You can add up to six columns this way, which is probably all you'd want for a standard-width webpage. If you shrink the browser width, these side-by-side elements responsively revert to taking up the full page width.

Selecting text changes the sidebar to formatting and color choices dictated by the template. Again, positioning text the way you want can be troublesome. For example, I couldn't move a text box from the right to the left side of my welcome image. And repositioning an element on a page isn't easy. You can only move it up and down, and even that is difficult. When I moved a block from lower on the page above other elements, the block moved very slowly when I hit the top of the screen, and the operation took a few attempts. Undo works in the page builder with Ctrl-Z, but there are no right-click options. On the other hand, in-place WYSIWYG typing is supported for all text on your site.

You add site pages from the same left toolbar by clicking on the page icon. You get just two choices: Page and News (for blogs). You can add a page description and keywords for some SEO push. Pages appear in the top site nav, and if you exceed a reasonable number of pages, the overflow appears in a dropdown. You can duplicate a page and move it up and down in the nav. To create nested submenus, you have to go into a page's settings gear. Unlike other site builders, uKit doesn't let you simply drag the subpage onto a parent-page entry.

The Design toolbar mode lets you change the site background color or use an image instead. You can also change the design template at any time.

uKit is one of very few site builders that uses gamification, in the form of badges you earn by completing various tasks, to propel you towards building and improving your site. When I personalized my test site's favicon, for example, I received the "Little Things Matter" badge, for example. There's a running count in your dashboard of any badges you earn. It's not a huge deal, but it does encourage you to really take care of steps you might otherwise neglect.

Working With Images

After you drag an image element onto a page, a placeholder photo appears, which you can easily crop or attach a caption to. Adding your own photos is well handled in uKit. You can drag and drop them onto the Image Library dialog, where everything you upload is saved for later use. You can also choose from a decent stock photo collection (with usage fees), use your Facebook photos, or enter an image URL. Unlike Wix, uKit doesn't let you upload, sell, or rent videos you upload to the site builder host.

One thing missing in uKit is integrated photo-editing capability beyond the aforementioned cropping. Rotation at the very least would help a lot. The Gallery widget is a simple grid of images, which the site viewer can click through for a fuller view. You can change the grid view to a collage or a slideshow with a filmstrip across the bottom. It works fine, but other builders offer more in the way of formatting, with rounded corners and the like.

At one point during testing, I encountered one consistent error related to cropping images on the page, but fortunately none of my site-building work was lost after the page refreshed. Other than that, the builder operated smoothly and reliably. Some builders go through gyrations that can confuse you while you're adding and editing elements, but I didn't get any of that with uKit.

Making Money With Your uKit Site

There's no simple PayPal button widget in uCoz's widget panel, so if you just want a simple, single Donate, or Buy button, you'll need a Pro level account so you can enter PayPal's widget code. For full eCommerce, uKit uses the feature-packed Ecwid online shopping cart and storefront software. I added this to a page of my test site, and the store design nicely matched my site design. You have to connect your Ecwid account, or you can create one right from the site builder. Ecwid takes you through onboarding your store with a six-step wizard. You choose the store layout on uKit, but otherwise you control all commerce functionality in Ecwid, from which you can manage customers, shipping methods, inventory, and more.

Mobile Site Building

Since uKit uses responsive design, any site you build is automatically formatted to also look good on mobile screens. Unlike most other modern site builders, however, there's no mobile editing view, though you can preview in tablet and phone emulation. This means, that, unlike with Wix or WebStarts, uKit doesn't let you do anything to change your mobile site's appearance. Squarespace used to have this same limitation, but that service now allows some mobile customization. My site looked fine on my iPhone 6s, but the menu button was on the right side, which is harder for one-handed navigation.

Blogging

When you add a page of the News type, you get a blog page, complete with a pretty decent post form. This lets you add links, images, videos, and a Read More delimiter for those very long posts. You can enable or disable commenting (which requires a Disqus account), and schedule a post to launch at a later date and time. In all, it's an excellent blogging tool—neither too gunked up with options nor too limited.

Publishing Your Site

I like that, unlike WebStarts, uKit lets you finish building your site before publishing, with a clear yellow Publish button for when you're ready. After you publish your site, a message box offers domain registration so that you can, for example, send people to techlover.com, rather than techlover.ulcraft.com. As is pretty standard, the box also presents links for sharing your site to Facebook and Twitter, along with a link to view the live site. Even if you're not ready to publish the site, you can create a backup at any point during site building.

As with most easy online site builders, uKit suffers from lock-in: There's no way to move your pages to another Web hosting service. If this is important to you, consider Weebly, which lets you take all your site code and assets, or Squarespace, which lets you switch to a WordPress host of your choice.

Stats and SEO

Unfortunately, uKit includes no built-in site visitor statistics. You have to jump through the hoops required to set up and connect a Google Analytics account to get any reporting at all. Doing so yields a ton of tracking options, but note that these stats are always delayed by a day. Built-in stats, such as those delivered by Weebly, tend to be delivered in near-real time.

You go to the Promotion page of the dashboard to start getting control of traffic drivers to your site. Here, an Analyze website button tells you whether your creation is actually ready for promotion. For example, my site didn't have enough quality original text to even be considered for promotion. Once your site is ready, uKit offers Search Console and Business Listing tools to raise your visibility on the Web. This is important, since people building sites may not realize that their sites won't appear in the major search engines without some effort, including submitting them to the engines and proving ownership.

You Can Do It With uKit

I enjoyed building my test site in uKit, which is not something I would say about all the site builders I've tested. Its interface is modern and clear, and the service provides all the tools you need to create a mobile-friendly, commerce-capable, and consistent-looking site. Its blogging tool is excellent, and it lets you decide when to publish. I also like that it saves your images (but not videos) in an online repository for reuse. You don't get an extensive gallery of third-party widget options, however, or any ability to customize your mobile site, and no built-in site statistics are provided. uKit is a very good, and very affordable website builder, and it's worth considering. But for better rounded services, you can't go wrong with Editors' Choices DudaOne and Wix. For more tips and advice on getting started building your website, read our primer.

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