uKit

Blog and e-commerce

It's easy to miss uKit's blogging platform, mostly because they've chosen to describe it as a 'News' page rather than a blog. But eventually we figured it out, and were ready to create our first post.

The blog gets off to a poor start with its basic editor, which restricts post content to text, images and videos. You can't assign tags or categories to a post to help visitors find the content they need, and you can't give a post a custom URL.

There are also some pluses, including YaShare and AddThis integration for social media sharing, comments support via Disqus, and the ability to schedule posts to be published automatically. 

The most interesting feature is the blog's ability to import up to 50 posts from your Facebook page. You could, in theory, use the import feature to grab content from Facebook, and never create any posts in uKit at all. That may be very convenient for some people, but as a pure blogging platform, uKit is very underpowered.

The ukit review is also very much basics-only, for instance with payments only covered by PayPal and the expensive Wallet One, but it's hard to expect more at these low prices, and if your needs are simple, uKit could be good enough.

Support

While UKit's editor is polished and intelligently-designed, the web help system feels like more of an afterthought. There's no clear Help link from within the editor, and although there's a Help option in the dashboard, even that only gives you another link to a web FAQ.

We clicked the FAQ link anyway, and were directed to a Russian language version. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but it seems that uKit is using simple static links, rather than paying attention to the user's location and current language. If so, that's amateurish and unprofessional, especially as, if uKit had done the slightest testing, it would be very easy to spot.

Fortunately, the Russian support page makes it reasonably easy to spot the problem, and once we realized English support page didn't work, either, we found that the support page without a language option finally got us to an English-language version.

Whether it was worth all this effort is open to question. There are some good articles, but not nearly enough. The ones you get aren't always sensibly organized or titled, making it difficult to find the answers you need. And although we had reached the English-language version of the FAQ, the localization issues hadn't entirely disappeared, with for instance the search engine displaying a Russian error message if we entered a keyword which wasn't found.

If the website doesn't have the information you need, reaching out to the support team should get you an answer. It took us a while to find out how to do this, as oddly it's hidden behind a 'Feedback' menu item, but eventually we figured it out and fired off a question. This time there were no problems, language or otherwise, and within an hour a friendly and helpful answer arrived telling us everything we needed to know.

uKit still has plenty of work to do on its support, then, but, overall, there should be enough to help you cope with most situations, especially if you get the live chat support available with the Premium+ plan.

Final verdict

Great in some areas, weak in others, uKit is difficult to score. Still, if you're looking for a website-building bargain, it's probably worth a look.

uKit Try Free