The Web’s gone mobile, and website building service Strikingly knows it. The Y Combinator-backed startup offers a suite of tools for building a mobile-optimized website in minutes.
I gave the free version of the service a try to make a website for my unborn child. I started out with a template with pre-populated info for 500 Startups’ Dave Mcclure and made my way down the page adding my own text and images.
Making the site was fairly easy to do, though its integration with Filepicker.io was a bit slow for my tastes. The templates are meant to accommodate fairly static information, so personal profiles and event pages are some of the most natural uses.
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The latest bells and whistles to come to the platform are new mobile actions feature for pro users that came out earlier this week. The actions, which include calls, texts, maps and emails, are nested in a redesigned menu that can be added to Strikingly sites.
Strikingly’s free version is fairly limited, as you won’t be able to drop the site you create onto your own domain and you’ll be limited to 500 MB of monthly bandwidth. For $12 a month you can use a custom domain, two sites and 5 GB per month. The pro version at $20 a month allows up to five sites and a crop of other features for customizing pages. Yearly plans, students and non-profits are eligible for discounts.
While Strikingly was certainly quick to set up, I don’t see any particularly noteworthy value propositions from the free version that aren’t already available in other services. It does look quite good on mobile, but it would take more than that to convince me to build a personal site with it instead of About.me or WordPress.com. However, small businesses can justify the monthly expense if it helps bring in mobile customers, so there may yet be room for Strikingly in the market.
Header Image credit: iStockphoto
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