IM Creator is a website builder for someone who wants to build a website for their business, event, or own self, yet does not have HTML programming skills. The product makes it simple to go from building the site all the way to buying a domain. They also have partnered with an eCommerce company to let a sell company products effortlessly on their site. Read our IM Creator review below.
OverviewWhat IM Creator does is both let you create a website plus they provide a platform to host it. It is designed for people with no programming skills. Their target market is the general user. They do not focus on any particular market, such a photographers. There have templates for general businesses, restaurants, and even weddings.
There are a few technical limitations, but not many. For example, there is no provision for JavaScript or style sheets. They have just a basic HTML editor whose code is applicable just for one section of the page meaning you could not modify a particular page division like a header. Nor can you do something complex like use Jquery to change the DOM. But if the user knew how to do that they would not be using IM Creator anyway, so that does not matter to the ordinary user.
There is no reason to worry about scalability or room to grow as the user can add as many pages as they want, they offer unlimited storage, and they run their system on the robust Amazon AWS virtual machine platform.
Their large number of users (They state that they have 8 million.) speaks to their reputation, but they boast of no design awards or certifications. They mention CNN, The NY Times, and The Next Web on their website, as if they were written about there, but do not provide links to any articles, leading one to wonder about that.
Key FeaturesA quick glance at expert reviews shows an average rating of 2-3 out of 5 stars. While that doesn’t look like a resounding endorsement, the actual critiques of IM Creator sound a lot more positive than the star rating implies. Many critics were hesitant to give higher ratings because IM Creator is ideal for a specific audience. Small business owners who expect to stay small and those who want to build a personal website will find that IM Creator is a great tool. It has plenty of features without including so many that they become overwhelming to beginners. Experts are also generous in their praise of the user interface and editing tools. The main drawback, and the big reason that IM Creator doesn’t receive better scores, is that the program simply isn’t the best option for larger businesses or those looking to actively promote their site through SEO.
IM Creator does have some major pros going for it. The templates are both modern and beautiful and the website building interface is super easy to use and intuitive. Anyone can quickly build a website without any coding experience. Users especially enjoy the ease of the drag-and- drop editor.
Customers were also happy with the pricing packages and reported excellent customer service. Beginners can watch tutorials, enjoy access to an extensive knowledge base and directly contact customer support when needed. These advantages make IM Creator an excellent choice for bloggers and small businesses.
Among users who were well aware of any scalability issues related to IM Creator, the reviews were extremely positive. When it comes to providing a user friendly website builder, IM Creator measures up to expectations.
IM Creator is not your feature packed option that comes with every available bell and whistle. For some consumers, this was a huge drawback. It is not designed for large scale businesses who are looking to improve search engine rankings. The SEO settings are very limited, which makes it nearly impossible to ensure that your website will be properly indexed by search engines.
Another big drawback to the program is that it doesn’t offer a mobile site editor. While visitors will be able to view your site on any device, it will be difficult to make improvements to how the site appears.
While IM Creator can make it easy to build a website, it falls short when it comes to marketing and increasing traffic.
Design & CustomizationFirst we look at some of the design options.
| Feature | Overview |
| Website Templates | They have templates built by themselves, but not third-party ones, such as an open source product would have, which vastly would expand the number of those. But there are plenty of templates, and they are elegantly laid out. These include fashion, freelancer, restaurant, wedding, talent, architecture, consultant, and others, including mobile templates. |
| Free | They have a free option, but that has to be hosted on their domain and not your own. |
| Premium | Their definition of premium means they remove the XPRS labels from your site, which is stuck there even if you use your domain.. In other words, your site becomes genuinely branded. (Here is another case of the XPRS-ImCreator confusion. They must be in transition regarding all of that, which they are since they say the XPRS is “new.”) |
| Website Builder Interface | The UI an essential feature of their system. As we said, they have two, which leads to confusion. |
| Page Style Customization | Their manual explains how to customize the page template. |
| Site Navigation | Another confusion has they switched themes as we navigated their site. So we found ourselves working in an entirely different menu structure. |
| Content Management | There are no tools to allow a team to work together on the same site. There is no versioning, for example. |
| Photos and Galleries | You can crop photos but not edit them. Adding a photo is easy. Just click the gallery widget to upload photos. |
| Mobile Site Building | They provide a default mobile template then let you modify it. |
| Social Sharing Integration | Those are readily available. |
| Design Services | No.They do not provide a service to you build your site. |
Features & Tools Here is a list of features that most people would need. We say whether or not ImCreator has those.
| Feature | Overview |
| Setup | ImCreator guides you through creating the first page to publishing it on your domain. |
| Web Design | You can pick page layouts, themes, tweak colors, and much more. |
| Custom domain name | Yes. |
| Depth of Navigation | You can add pages without limit. |
| Widgets and Apps | There are lots of widgets and apps including a Twitter feed, Vimeo, Google Maps, SoundCloud, JotForm contact form, a regular contact form, and a Facebook Like button. |
| Monetization | (See the comments on eCommerce below. Apart from that there is no Google Ads widget or the ability to use other advertisers.) |
| Visitor Statistics | There are no visit page reports, but you can add analytics code and then use Analytics for that. Of course, the beginner would need a person with some basic HTML knowledge to help with that. |
| Photo,Video,and Audio | You can add Vimeo or YouTube videos but not Daily Motion or BrightCove. But the first two are enough for the vast majority of people. There is no feature to add audio, as in MP4 files, but you can add SoundCloud, so that would work for most people since it allows playback. |
| Blogging | Yes,you can add a blogging stripe. Stripe is what they call each of their page sections. |
| Google Maps | You can embed Google maps and give it an address as a starting point.There is no way to pass it an address dynamically. |
| HTML Editor | There is no code-assist type editor, but you can enter HTML code directly. So the person writing HTML could make a mistake and have to spend some time figuring out why their page does not work. |
| Social Media Integration | Yes.Social media icons are displayed prominently on each page. |
| Forms and surveys | There is a contact form but not the ability to create custom fields or build a form to enter those. Nor is there a survey feature. |
| Storage Space | Unlimited. |
| Newsletter Tool | There is no ability to create a newsletter and then email that.The user would have to download the contacts and then upload those emails into another service for that. |
| Forum | No. |
| E-Commerce / Online Store | This complex process is made easy by IM Creator. Just click the option to add the ability to sell whatever is shown on the screen.The system is connected to the Sprocket eCommerce platform. They charge a 2% commission and use Stripe as the payment gateway. Then they send the site owner payment through Paypal. |
| Gateway Integration | Users who use the eCommerce feature get a merchant account automatically at Stripe. That means there is no need to set up a payment gateway manually. Of course, there is a downside to using Sprocket, Stripe, and PayPal as they all charge a steep commission. Someone who wants to sell a larger volume should find vendors who they can negotiate with or who charge less. |
| SEO Friendly | IM Creator lets the you enter a title, keywords, and description and social image preview. Plus you can add your Google Analytics id. All of this would create the meta tags to give the site the ability to control the summary that is shown in Google and facilitate SEO. However, there is no option to assign titles to images to take advantage of that type of SEO discovery. You can also add links to hidden pages. |
| Site Limited Access (Password Protection) | None.As with a comment form, Tripadvisor, Yelp, and other options, they just provide links to instructions to those other sites where you can add the HTML manually to do that.So you would have to program your password protection, such as you might use when you are building your site to keep people out. |
| Google® Analytics | Yes,you can embed analytics code. |
| Website Security | You site protected by the security tools at Amazon AWS. Since you do not have access to a command shell, like ssh, there is not much chance of someone hacking your site that way. As for SQL injection or other hacking, any site would be subject to that if there were weaknesses in any of the widgets, which experience says there would be, but that they would fix those as fast as they find them. And then no one can protect against a denial of service (DOS) attack. |
| Multiple Languages | No.But they provide some workaround instructions using hidden links. When we signed into the site from a Spanish-speaking country with Spanish set as the language on our computer it came up in English, so there is no foreign language support for the design interface either. Presumably, as a domain registrar, they would not be able to register domains in country domains, like site.com.uk, showing they are targeting the US English-speaking market only. |
| Mobile Optimization | A nice feature is that it proposes a mobile template based upon the desktop template that you picked. |
| CDN Technology | No. |
Plans & Pricing So their pricing is confusing too.
Their paid plans are offering unlimited storage and ten email addresses.
There is a free option if you want to host your site on their domain and not your own. That is limited to 50MB of storage. You can use that while you work to complete your site or are evaluating it. They will ask for your credit card information when you move to your domain.
There are no limitations on the features when you are working on the free version except, of course, you could not add eCommerce to that.
Customer Support Here are their support options:
| Feature | Overview |
| Phone | No |
| Support email | Yes,with average 12 hour response time. We tested this, and they got back to us within that time frame. |
| Chat | No |
| Knowledge Base | Yes, searchable. |
| Video Tutorials | Yes.Those are on their YouTube channel. |
| Support Forum | Yes |
| Additional Options | They include their manual in PDF format that you can print. That is rather old-fashioned but does provide an easy way to search for instructions. Plus one wonders how they can keep their manual up-to-date as they add new features, as editing such a long book takes time. But that could be a bad sign meaning they do not often add new features. |
| FAQ. | It has that with sections on eCommerce, billing, advanced editing, billing, getting starting and how to switch templates. |
The company would not say whether they staff their support desk 24×7. But they said,“We try to reply in a timely manner to each email, usually within 12 hours or 24 hours over weekends.” By that they mean “including the weekend” as is written on their site.
The first time we opened a support ticket, to test their response, the agent that we contacted wrote back a professional response without giving us a canned one. Plus they followed up with a customer-satisfaction survey. That is good. And their blogs are all written by the same person, who should be an expert, since he wrote all of those too. So that is also good. And since their platform uses Amazon, it should provide a reliable service.
Ease of Use ImCreator is a super easy way to build a website. It is geared to the beginner instead of the advanced user. There is no in-line help context, but it’s not needed for the items to fill in on the screen are simple enough, and there are other self-service help tools.
One thing we like with IM Creator is that you start building a site right on their site without even having to register. So you can evaluate it without getting on some annoying mailing list. You pick a template and then add social media icons, graphics, YouTube videos, or even some simple HTML and then pay only when you want to publish the site.
However, their site does create confusion because it appears they are using two different tools with three different names: ImCreator, XPRS, and polydom, as we said. Polydom is another name for XPRS, albeit written to present is as something more than just an editor.
There are these four basic steps to getting started with the first page.
Conclusion Given their large number of users and that they use Amazon as a hosting platform, there is not much chance that you would go wrong picking this product. They do need to provide clarification between the ImCreator.com and XPRS names, which they probably know since they label XPRS as “new.” And they need to make clear how a polydom is different than XPRS if it is at all. As it is presented polydom looks like some kind of programming framework for creating web sites, which is certainly is not.
IM Creator website builder is not Joomla or WordPress open-source tools, so there is no robust community of third-party widget developers. That means you are limited to their set of tools and writing your own HTML code snippets. But presumably you are looking for a complete CMS (content management system) if you are not looking at the relative difficulty of Joomla or WordPress.
Their apparent lack of a CDN network might be an issue for a global business since users around the world will see some latency without having content cached near them. But theireCommerce site is not going to work in foreign countries anyway (i.e., another currency), so this is definitely a product geared for the American market
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