WebStartsReviews of webstarts.com

I've been please with my website but just had a very not-so-positive experience when I renewed for another year. I did this renewal over the phone to make sure I understood all the charges. The person I spoke to was very nice but he not only charged me for the agreed upon service, but when I checked my bank account I discovered that he had also made an unauthorized deduction. I know it was a mistake, but still trouble for me. And then when I called about it, the person I talked to said he would cancel the mistake right away which he didn't. When it was finally taken care of no one bothered to let me know. I found out through my bank.

Hello Internet, I have been using WebStarts as a dedicated customer since around early to mid 2011. Since then, and now with me almost on my way to college as a senior in high school, WebStarts has helped me succeed in my young life as an entrepreneurial web designer and CEO of a web hosting company. While using WebStarts, I have disagreed on some stuff which they added and annoyed the staff to a certain point back then, but its most likely because I was somewhat conservative and needed time to get used to new features. But anyways, back to the review. Over the long period of using WebStarts I found that it was a very wonderful experience...while it lasted of course. The WebStarts website building and editing tool was extremely easy, and still is to this day. The templates offered are modern, trendy, and appealing to anyone who would stumble upon a WebStarts-powered website. Thing is though, using WebStarts I was somewhat annoyed by the previous spam emails saying that if I didn't upgrade by tonight something could happen. Either way that is the least of my problems using WebStarts because business is business. My problem started when my previous designer platform account expired (I believe sometime around 2014ish or so). I was planning on re-buying the designer platform to continue my freelance web design business. Right before I actually sought to stay with WebStarts and use their platform, I was diverted away by its false advertising techniques. You see, with WebStarts and their designer platform they say we can have our own branded hosting. Problem is this: that is not true at all. In the client's dashboard there are buttons with links to purchase certain features. Knowing I would allow clients to edit their sites I opted to turn away, because I immediately noticed while the videos were white-labeled, that the links all went to WebStarts which causes them to gain more money, and even have my clients leave my service for theirs because of pricing and more advertising. Quite frankly the only way it could be truly white-labeled is if they remove their links by getting rid of stock and designer community templates (assuming the designer would allow their clients to edit their own sites), getting rid of the WebStarts backlinks in the dashboard, and offering more customization options. So yes, WebStarts was a 5 star wonderful experience for me and I was eternally grateful for Adam Barger's creation of a powerful and unique service for people worldwide. But now I have moved on the greener pastures as a designer and CEO of my own hosting business (which I will not name because I'm not to advertise, but to review out of respect and honor of Trustpilot's guidelines and WebStarts). Because WebStarts is still a great website building and marketing tool to use I give it three stars.

I like the interface. The learning curve is not NEARLY as steep as it is for Wordpress so I love that. Not too expensive, either. The problem I'm having is that pictures keep disappearing. Not just my pictures, but even those provided by WebStarts. If I had a website that used a lot of images, I would be very concerned and would want to make sure there won't be a problem. I have found this to be very discouraging. I could contact customer service, but I'm so discouraged about this that I'm dreading working on my website. It has been several days since I checked my website so I decided to check it for this review. The images still aren't there. I was trying to reduce the amount of images on my website as a work-around, but I'm just not happy with going in that direction. The image that was part of the landing page which THEY provided isn't even showing up. I've tried other browsers and it still doesn't work. Designing a website is a creative process and it's these kind of glitchy obstacles which poison my motivation. Maybe I'll get around to looking into it when the frustration isn't so fresh. On Thursday July 16, 2015 I received an email from Webstarts saying: "We can help! Leave us a positive review on TrustPilot for WebStarts and we’ll credit your account with 1GB of free cloud storage. Click the link below to review WebStarts now…" So clearly they are rewarding people for leaving positive reviews. So which ones are really positive and which ones just wanted the reward? It calls into question the integrity of all their reviews if they are simply rewarding the positive ones. I decided to just leave an honest review. I don't know if they will still give me the reward. This site is called "TRUSTpilot"?

POSITIVES - Webstarts is a simple, easy to use platform. Anyone can master the very user-friendly drop and drag format, without any experience or advanced technical ability. It's also very affordable, which is great for anyone starting out! NEGATIVES - I have experienced a couple of minor technical glitches along the way. For example, when I return to edit the site, some fonts and layouts have 'magically' changed etc. I have experienced a few too many emails from the company trying to upsell. I have, to date, been unable to integrate Google Analytics with my Webstarts site (to track it's performance), as the platform does not give 'back end' access to the appropriate coding 'tags' for me to do so. Happy for someone to correct me on this if I'm wrong, or to let me know if this has been upgraded. There is a Webstarts stats functionality which is supposed to serve a similar function, but I have been told by professionals that Google Analytics is far superior, and I would rather use that. It also seems there are some limitations when attempting to professionally SEO the site for higher google rankings, due to the same issue.