In a Nutshell
pros
- Low monthly subscription rates
- Drag-and-drop website editor
cons
- No wizard to guide website creation
- No free trial for Ecommerce offering
Yahoo at a Glance
Easy-to-use
Website Packages
Reliability
Customer Service
Integrations
Standout Features
The Yahoo Websites model is intended to allow individuals or small businesses to create a serviceable website quickly. It's not ideal for a larger operation that requires advanced features. For example, Yahoo may limit your disk space and email storage growth if your use of resources burdens their systems. So scalability is not a strong point of their offering. However, for a humble website, the following features are very useful:
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Free domain
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Customizable templates
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Unlimited site pages
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Built-in search engine optimization (SEO) tools
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30-day satisfaction guarantee
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Up to 5 email inboxes
Ease of Use
The process of building a website with Yahoo was designed with beginners in mind. You select the template that most closely fits your tastes, and customize it with your own content using Yahoo's drag-and-drop editor. Changing fonts, switching background colors, adding images, blogs, animation, slideshows or videos is all self-explanatory. If you get stuck, which is possible for novices, you can consult Yahoo's help articles.
While it would be nice if the editor had a built-in wizard to guide you through the customization process, you should be able to figure it out through trial and error. Yahoo Websites does a better job of walking users through the steps needed to increase their ranking on search engines such as Google. The SEO tools are accessible from the menu of the editor, and users are clearly guided through the necessary steps.
With a large percentage of web traffic coming from mobile devices, it is important that a website look as good on cell phones and tablets as it does on a laptop or desktop computer. Yahoo Websites makes this easy, ensuring that its templates look good on all devices. You make changes in one place, and they will automatically be reflected on the mobile view of your site as well. In fact, you can use the Yahoo Website editor to see a mobile preview of the changes you've made before they go online.
Pricing
Yahoo Websites offers 3 plans, all of which give you access to the company’s drag-and-drop editor and more than 150 mobile-optimized templates. While there is no free plan, there is a month-long free trial of the Lite Plan.
Plan
Lite
Basic
Professional
Price (billed annually)
$5/month
$7/month
$10/month
Storage
3GB
5GB
10GB
The Lite Plan allows you to set up a website for $5 per month, but it will be on a yahoosites.com domain. This means that rather than your site having an address such as www.mysite.com, it will have an address such as www.mysite.yahoosites.com. In order to get a real domain, you’ll have to opt for the $7 per month Basic Plan. This plan also gives you additional storage, 1 email mailbox and multiple email aliases. For features such as private domain registration, more email inboxes and more storage, you’ll have to opt for the $10/month professional plan.
Affordability is a big part of what makes Yahoo Websites tick, and every plan includes unlimited site pages, built-in SEO tools, 24/7 support and a 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee.
Templates
Yahoo Websites has over 150 templates to choose from in a number of categories. As we’ve previously mentioned, all of the templates are optimized to look good on tablets and cell phones as well. The categories included are business, services, design, health & wellness, photography, restaurants & food, catalog & retail, portfolio & CV, fashion & beauty, weddings, music & video, and lodging. The designs are simple yet modern, featuring a homepage and give you the ability to add as many section pages to the navigation menu as you want.
Ecommerce/Online Store
Plan
Starter
Standard
Professional
Price (billed annually)
$10.95 per month
$25.95 per month
$254.95 per month
Transaction fee
1.5%
1%
.75%
The Starter Plan, for $10.95 per month, comes with unlimited product listings, a 1.5% transaction fee per sale, 1,000 email accounts, Google Analytics integration, credit card and PayPal processing, live chat with customers and UPS shipping integration. If you upgrade to the Standard Plan, the transaction fee drops to 1%, and you get extra features, such as integration with your inventory and accounting systems, gift certificate capabilities and API access for 3rd party solutions. The Professional Plan, for $254.95 per month, includes all of these features and it drops the transaction fee to .75%.
Unfortunately there is no free trial of Yahoo Stores, so you can’t try it out before committing to a plan.
Customer Service
Yahoo offers 24 hour phone, chat and email support on all of its plans. In addition, there is a help section with step-by-step, illustrated articles that explain how to use the editor. There is also a community section of the help page where you can ask questions of other Yahoo customers and view previous forum discussions.
Conclusion
Yahoo Websites is an effective do-it-yourself website platform with basic functionality for personal and small business use. Its drag-and-drop editor is not quite as intuitive as some of its competitors, and it lacks advanced capabilities for bigger businesses, but if you’re looking to create a relatively simple website, then the price is right.
About
Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. It is considered a pioneer in the world of web services. Yahoo Small Business offers a number of services to help small businesses online, including Yahoo Websites. The company also offers hosting, Ecommerce and business mail solutions.
Physical Address
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089