It seems like every thing, and everyone these days has a website. Heck, even I do. If you think about it, the internet is the hub of all information, so it only makes sense to have a website for yourself, or a product you’re making. However, what keeps a lot of people away from creating their own websites, is the fact that not everyone knows how to code a good looking website. HTML, and CSS in itself is vast enough, add JS and others to the mix, and it’s enough to confuse most people. If those terms didn’t make much sense to you, or if they did, but you just don’t want to invest a lot of time in creating your own website, Mobirise can probably help you there. Mobirise claims to be a one-stop solution for creating websites (that are mobile-friendly) without coding, and for free. So, naturally we tried it out, and here is our review of the Mobirise website building tool:
Mobirise Interface
First things first, it seems as if the official Mobirise website itself is made on Mobirise. It has all of the interface blocks, and UI elements that you can easily find on the Mobirise app for Windows, or Mac. This is great news, because it just makes me trust their product even more, before even trying. But that’s not how I’d judge a website building tool, so obviously, I made a sample website (more on that later).
When you first launch Mobirise, it asks for a sign up, which would usually put me off. However, the sign up process on Mobirise is simple enough. Just enter your email, and viola! You’ll receive a randomly generated password (or so it seems, at the very least) on your email, which you’ll have to use to log in to the app and begin creating websites.
Honestly, the Mobirise interface can be collectively described in a single word: amazing. The application is superbly designed, with well laid out controls, an intuitive navigation system, and very well named options.
With an interface that nice, Mobirise is already off to a stellar start in my review. So, naturally, I decided to test it further, and tried creating a simple website, keeping in mind the amount of time it took to build it, with all the text and images, as compared to the time it’d take if I coded it out all by myself (something I don’t think I’d be able to do very well, anyway.)
Building a Website with Mobirise
I wasn’t exactly skeptical of Mobirise’s abilities, but I did think “how good can it be?”. Suffice it to say, I’ve never been happier to be wrong. Mobirise simply blew me away with the ease of use, and the quick drag-drop method of adding blocks to the webpage. It’s basically a modular approach at building websites, and has been executed to perfection.
Inline editing of text is a great break from having to click on text boxes, and having to edit text in a separate text entry field. Mobirise has clearly spent quite a bit of time on improving UX, and I appreciate that a lot.
The side menu has some really useful options. The most important one being “Pages” – where you can add pages to your website. Unless you’re making a single scrollable landing page, you’ll need to add other pages to your website. Adding pages is easy, and you can easily link between your pages as well.
There are a number of different types of blocks available, so you can add almost any type of data to your website. You can choose blocks from the broad categories of “Intros”, “Media”, “Pricing Tables”, “Sliding Banners”, “Footers”, and a lot more. Basically, anything you may need on your website, you can find in the form of a Mobirise block to literally just drop on to your webpage.
You can customise each single block from the “Block Parameters” option that shows up at the top right corner of each block. The button is aptly shaped like a settings cog, and shows all the options you have for that particular block. One thing I particularly like, is how every option is properly named, and the changes take effect in real-time, so you don’t need to refresh the page or anything to see what changed.
Mobirise offers a one-stop solution to checking what your website will look like on different devices. By default, you’re in the desktop mode. However, you can switch to a tablet view, or a mobile view from the top pane, and see how your website re-arranges elements to properly fit into smaller screens.
Preview and Publishing Options
Once you’re done creating all the pages for your website, interlinking them, and customising every aspect of the website that you want to, you’ll obviously want to publish the website to the internet. There are a couple of options you an use here.
Mobirise offers a neat “Preview” option. This is helpful for a final check of the website, and to see if all the links are working as expected. This is a preview of the website I created using Mobirise. This took me around 5 minutes.
If everything is fine with your website, you can go ahead and publish it directly from Mobirise! The application offers options to publish to a local folder, or upload to your hosting with FTP. There’s even an option for publishing the website to GitHub Pages! That’s really cool! I actually published my website to GitHub Pages, and you can view it here. Check it out, it’s kinda nice!
If you don’t have a server hosting yet, you should definitely go with the option to publish to a local folder. This will simply save the entire website to a folder of your choosing, and you can push it to your hosting when you get one. Overall, the software offers a complete publishing solution for your website, and you can easily preview your website in real time.
Verdict
If this entire review hasn’t been any indicator of the verdict I’ll be giving, here you go. Mobirise is quite simply a great tool to create beautiful, responsive websites without writing a single line of code. It’s amazing, and it works so well, it’s almost weird that they give it for free. True, there is a paid pack that gives you access to a plethora of paid themes and extensions, but the app and the basic themes are always free. Not just that, you can use Mobirise for free, for personal and commercial use! Mobirise is also working on a newer version of their application, Mobirise 4 (preview video), which will feature Flexbox support, a new Code Editor, a faster GUI, as well as an API for developers to create themes and extensions for the application. It’s definitely an update to look forward to.
Bottom line is that if you’re looking to create a website for yourself, to showcase a product, or just for an event, you can use Mobirise to do it in a fraction of the time it’d take to develop it from scratch, and at a cost that won’t hurt your wallet (even if you use a paid, premium theme). So, have you ever wanted to make your own website without coding? What tools did you use? Also, do check out Mobirise, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
