Best website
builders on iPad
Official website: smart-webcreator.com
Category: Business
Version we tested: 2.1.3 (free trial)
Compatibility: iOS 8.0+ iPhone, iPad, iPod touch
Also available on Android devices.
This app features a cute and helpful? yellow bear character who guides the users throughout the website creation process.
To register, tap "Create an account" and input your email address. Then, you have to check your email inbox and look for an email coming from [email protected]. This email contains a passcode you must type to confirm the registration.
You can then log in and tap "Make a New Site". To setup a website, you need to give it an address, a name, and then select a "frame design" (i.e. a Wordpress template).
Smart Web Creator follows the form approach of a website builder. The first hurdle is to find where you should put the content (texts and images) of your website. The correct answer is: "Contents Settings" (I have circled it in orange in the screenshot below to save you some time).Then the list of pages is displayed. You should explore each page to understand its structure. Usually, the 1st element of a page is a text+image bloc, and then there is a page-specific form (for a location and map, for a contact form, for a picture gallery, for a product catalog...). The pages you can add afterwards (in the Menu settings) all have a simple text+image structure.
While Smart Web Creator app can work in both portrait and landscape mode, we strongly recommand the portrait mode because there are many layout glitches in the landscape mode. For example: in the text editor, the toolbar disappears when you edit text; in the "Menu settings", the page up/down buttons are overlapped with the big "next" button; the same big button overlaps with text in the text editor...
By the way, regarding the labels of the navigations buttons at the bottom of the screens, you should note that "Next" means "Apply" and "Back" means "Cancel".
So, as explained above, most of the content of the website pages shall be input in the text editor. There are 3 issues here:
• Some text-related features, like heading, bold, italic... do not work as expected.
• Linking to other pages is tricky, because you must input the final address of the target page (in many other website builders, you are presented a list of pages to link to from within the editor).
• Inserting images is possible, but not resizing them nor wrapping text around.
If you are HTML-literate, you can for sure reach a decent result... after some effort.
In Smart Web Creator, you can easily change from one Wordpress theme to another. You won't lose your content, but for some themes, the integration has not been done properly (or maybe it's a native bug of the 3rd party theme). For example, in the theme named Aadya, what you have input in the Description field (in Site Information screen) appears above the menu bar, and the layout of the search box is clumsy.
Ease of use
★★☆☆☆
The teddy bear character could make you think that even a child could create a website with this app. Unfortunately, the app is not so easy to use: button and screen names are not so helpful, the "Contents setting" button to edit web pages is not prominent at all (see picture above), creating a link from a page to the other is not as simple as it should, inserting a picture in a blog post is beyond our own capability...
Smart Web Creator apps also make use of some uncommon navigation patterns: "Back" means "Cancel" ; "Next" means "Apply" ; when you push a button, most often there is no immediate feedback, so you are not sure if you should tap again or wait a bit ; and when a pop-up menu appears on screen, you can not type on the background to close that menu.
Features
★★☆☆☆
This app supports a map, an image gallery, and a product catalog, but no video though. More importantly, the basics are not there: Well, you can type text and insert pictures on your web pages, but adjusting layout or text formatting does not work well. A blog editor is integrated into the app, but it's not possible to insert a picture into a blog post. On paid plans, you can track the performance of your website.
You can edit your website on an Android device or an iPhone. The app is exactly the same. Smart Web Creator app actually looks better on a phone than on an iPad.
Clarity
★★☆☆☆
On Smart web creator app, the Main menu is really an issue: viewing your published website appears first, while editing it is a small button in the 5th line. And the button naming is quite bad...
On the main menu screen, there is a clear button to access the online help guide. Unfortunately, this guide is not detailed enough to be helpful. For example, while there is obviously a feature to insert an image in a blog post, we could not find a clear "How to" tutorial.
Design
★★☆☆☆
The generated website can be previewed faithfully in Smart Web creator app. As the text is not wrapped around images, the published website does not look so nice. Its look and feel heavily depends upon the Wordpress theme it is based on. With Aadya theme, the layout around the search box on computers is not clean, and the introductory text on the smartphone is too small.
Lightness
★★★☆☆
The published website loads very fast. On the theme we have worked on (Aadya) at least, the Description metatag (which is quite important for search engine optimization) is extracted from the 1st lines of the text on the page. This does not let much room for ... optimization.
Chance to complete
★☆☆☆☆
Smart Web Creator is an attempt to rework the famous WordPress CMS into a user-friendly mobile app. Unfortunately, it lends tow much on the cute & pretty side (teddy bear character). Menus are not clear and the text editor is below par. The structure of the pages is not flexible either (if you have 2 distinct categories of products, you have no choice but to mix them together). All in all, there is little chance your project can fit into a Smart Web Creator website.
