I signed up for Yola.com and it was easy. They didn't ask for much more than my name and email. After entering my information and clicking the signup button, I was greeted with the message

"Congratulations, you're all signed up! That was easy, wasn't it?
Now let's start building your site."

So that was cool. I didn't have to click some stupid sign up confirmation link in my email. I was ready to start building my web site.

First thing they ask is what category your site belongs in. I just chose "Personal". Once I chose "Personal" Yola recommended some default pages to have on my site, "Blog" and "Picture Gallery". I kept these defaults and I named my site "Yola Review".

Next it was time to pick a style for my web site. By "style" they mean the look and layout of my yola web site. These might be called templates.

Yola offered a decent amount of what looked like pretty basic templates. I was kind of surprised that some of the templates cost money and were designated as "Premium Templates" although they didn't look very "premium". Some of these "Premium" templates looked pretty boring if you ask me.

The price of the premium templates ranged from $19.95 to $49.95.

I just went with a free template. Yola had plenty of free templates and most of them were just about as good as any of the Premium templates. Besides, I wasn't going to pay for a premium template just so I could review Yola.

So I picked my free template, waited about a minute, and then my web site was ready.

Here's the first screen I saw after I chose my free template:

So basically, Yola sends the user directly to the editing section of their web site. So I started editing my site right away.

Yola's web site editing interface was really easy to use. The interface was truly WYSIWYG and looked similar to Google Docs. The process was really easy. I didn't notice anything wonky about Yola's WYSIWYG web site editor. Everything worked and it didn't require much thought to use it. Yola's web site builder is a winner.

Some cool features that Yola offers:

  • Good selection of free page templates
  • Very easy to use
  • Free subdomain
  • Can add plain HTML to site with an HTML widget that won't butcher HTML code. In other words, I was able to easily paste a Youtube embed code without the website builder messing it all up.
  • Search Engine Friendly
  • 1024 MB of file storage
  • Lots of widgets to add Youtube, Flickr, Adsense, etc.

Disadvantages:

  • A Link back to Yola is required for all free users.

I really think I like Yola.com. I haven't been a big fan of any of the new breed of free web hosting sites. I usually don't like that they don't offer FTP and other conveniences. But Yola is a free web hosting site that does it all right.

Yola offers an easy to use click and type and drag and drop type of interface that makes it easy for anyone to make a decent web site regardless of their skill level. Advanced webmasters will like how Yola lets them write pure HTML.