About.com Rating



Intuit Websites is an online provider of different website products and simple website design tools. I like Intuit Website Builder. I have used many different website design companies, and have always been very impressed with the amount of options Intuit offers. More importantly, I like the customer service -- you can easily find a phone number on the website and speak to an actual person (shocking, I know).

If you are looking into a website provider, consider Intuit. I think it is a perfect tool for home business owners.

Just this month, Intuit Websites added new features and enhancements to their existing product offering -- I must say, I am pretty happy with the additions.

• Simple Site Building Tools & Robust Templates
• Traffic Booster SEO Optimization
• Online Store: Fully Integrated Ecommerce

Site Building Tools & Templates:

This is where I think Intuit Websites really stands out from its competitors. It offers 2,000 different template options and a user can browse templates based off various intuitive criteria, like: what you want to do, who your customer is, business type, website personality, and desired color scheme. Additionally, the design tools are simple. The editing pallet seems very familiar and doesn't require guess work when making changes.

Traffic Booster SEO Optimization:

I am happy to see that Intuit offered this must-have search engine optimization (SEO) component. The tool, "Traffic Booster", uses SEO techniques to help the website's pages get found by search engines.

It generates the meta information and also link-backs via the included listing on their comprehensive Intuit business directory. This tool is an additional monthly cost, but may be a nice addition for those small business owners who don't have funds to hire an SEO expert or who don't have the know how to do it themselves. The cost is under $9 per month.

Fully Integrated Ecommerce:

Now you can add a shopping cart and payment processing service to any Intuit Website with their SimpleStore plug-in. Creating the online store is very simple and Intuit provides the back-end functionality to make sure you get the order notification. This feature adds an additional $34.98 per month. Here is a separate SimpleStore review.

Costs:

Intuit offers a free 30-day trial of their products. Once that is complete, a basic website is $4.99/month. The next level up is $19.99/month and this includes a custom domain name, email and more storage/bandwidth. If you are interested in an online store functionality in addition to all the other features, it is around $35/month.

Another nice feature is that each different price-points offers access to robust website metrics. Which means, any Intuit Website customer will have access to a ton of statistics and reports on their website visitor's behavior.
What Customers Are Saying:
I had the opportunity to speak with Jodi Skorupski, a small business owner and Intuit Website customer. She is a stylist and runs a consulting business, Style Success. She has been incredibly happy with her experience with Intuit and what she has appreciated above all is the amount of time the simple editing tools have saved her. Additionally, the vast amount of templates to choose from has given her lots of options to impress her client base. Jody also likes how Intuit is trying to stay one step ahead of her growing business, "I know I'm not going to have switch web companies when I'm ready to grow and expand my business.