UENI offers a website building service that promises to "grow your small business." Plans start with a free option called "Starter" that includes up to 10 bookings and/or leads, up to 5 images in your gallery, and a maximum of €250 in sales per month. Basic (not available if you pay monthly), includes SSL certificate, 2 email addresses, access to premium website design service, unlimited bookings and up to €500 in sales. You can also get priority VIP support. This evil costs him $129 a year. The Plus plan gives you unlimited bookings, sales and images. Includes full access to premium website designs, €10 in ad spend, and one-on-one access with a website expert and one-on-one to help you grow your business. All for €39 per month or €349 per year. Finally, we have Reputation (€499 per year or €59 per month) which unlocks all the other features, including the Reputation Manager and Review Request Services. We'll take a look at the free plan and see if it's worth exploring further.
Give UENI information about you and your company so your AI has something to do (Image credit: UENI)
Contac us
Choosing this plan allows us to enter directly into the creation process. You create an account and answer a series of questions so that UENI can better understand your business. We ran into a problem: even though we listed our phone number as UK, we still had to choose a US state as part of our address. Somehow, picking one at random seemed to lead us to the next round of questions. Another limitation is when asked what you want to do with your site; for example, you can't choose "blog" and "sell online", or any other option: you can only select one, which seems very limiting.
and ready to wait 3 (or in our case 5) days before your site is ready to be edited… (Image credit: UENI) And after you have answered all your questions and provided all images, links to a video, maybe some text about your business, you're good to go! ... In three days". Hope for? This is because your site is designed by humans, not some automatic computer-driven model, but very unusual nonetheless... On the bright side, an advertised three-day wait is just a paragraph away for you, Dear reader ...
Interlude
The last time we looked at UENI, it took a little over 24 hours for our site to be ready. This time it was a wait of almost five days, although in fairness it included a weekend. In an online world accustomed to instant gratification, that really is a long wait. Let's see the results...
After a lesson in waiting, your site is finally ready... to customize (Image credit: UENI)
Themes
With your site ready, you are redirected to your Hub on the UENI website. You can use it to go to your website or, more important to us, click "Edit Website" and start tweaking. At least that's what we expected.
Except that your customization options are extremely limited. Four themes, limited color schemes, and a handful of fonts, almost all limited to paid plans. (Image credit: UENI) Yes, you can choose the themes, but of the four shown, only one is available with the free plan; it is possible to click on the other three and see what your site will look like to get an idea of what. it is worth spending money on it. Each theme has a selection of colors that you can select from. These two color options are different for each theme. 'Origins' (the free one) has 9, but the other three have 5 each. As for the fonts, like the colors, they are combined in pairs and you have 30 pairs to choose from, but only one of these pairs is free. All the others are premium. Okay, our theme customization is extremely limited, how's your page editing going?
Sections
Your page is divided into sections. Each can be accessed via a navigation bar located at the top. It doesn't take you to a new page, but it's a faster way to get to that section instead of scrolling down a really long page. Your options here are also quite limited and not very intuitive. You can edit the description and add new photos, which is great because most of the current text is AI generated. There's nothing wrong with the wording itself, but it doesn't sound unique, and you may think some tweaking is needed to make it more like you. All this can be done through the sidebar on the left.
Text editing is done via the sidebar, which looks as modern as possible (Image credit: UENI) Basic formatting such as bold, italics, underlined, and bulleted or numbered lists is accessible, but if you want add a hyperlink, sorry, that's on top of that, and the service will immediately prompt you to update. On the level .
Add images from your computer or via a URL. There are no links to stock images and no image editing tools, not even cropping (Image credit: UENI) What was a bit confusing for us were the photos UENI chose to use. We chose to build a site for an IT department and uploaded several snapshots during the initial process. But strangely, once the site is finished, none of the photos we had uploaded show us. Instead, stock footage was used. Fortunately, changing this is easy. You will find the plan in one of the sections, click upgrade and choose a different one. There is no link to a royalty-free online library, so there was still no explanation of where these mysterious photos came from. Your only options are to upload them from your computer or paste the URL if the photo is already available online. There are no image editing options, and you also can't select which section of the image to crop; this is done automatically for you. The inability to edit directly on the page, when so many competing services let you, is frustrating and constantly reminds you that you can do your personalization work faster and better elsewhere.
You can configure services, describe them, set your prices, etc. (Image credit: UENI)
Service features
While setting up an eCommerce store isn't part of the free plan (some other services allow you to test this part of their offering with a handful of products), setting up services is. We liked the ability to book a session which is very easily changed and is part of the free offer, but that's about all we liked about this service.
Blogs and support
We have tried to locate any type of blogging tool, but have been unsuccessful. No section hints at this possibility, nor does any information in the settings, which is limited to choosing your currency, adding a favicon, connecting an existing domain name, and switching. From your cart (the last two can only be used if you are upgrading to a paid plan). But no blog tool.
At least there's a help center, with some good information on what you can do and where you can get it (Image credit: UENI) So we jump to the help center where we find some information: blogs seem to be available only with the topic "Classic". It sounds remarkably restrictive – what if you want a blog but prefer a different topic? Add in the fact that blogging is only available on a paid plan when many other services offer this feature for free, and you have a very disappointing experience.
Final verdict
This service is supposed to make it easy to set up an online presence, but we found it frustrating to get started, difficult and even restrictive to modify, and incredibly limited in its options. Despite its seeming simplicity, it does require a certain level of IT expertise to get what you want out of it, which seems like a contradiction, as those confident enough to do so will likely use a different service, and those who don't. they are .no. they would lose themselves here. We think it's more of a curiosity than anything else.