Duda is a website builder aimed at website design agencies, but it has a secret… It’s easy enough for just about anyone to use! I almost skipped doing my review of Duda, because it was aimed at website building professionals.
I thought that meant that it would be too difficult for the average person to use. I was wrong!
Duda is a powerful and easy to use website builder, perfect for people building their own websites or professionals building websites for others.
Let’s dive in and take a first look at Duda!
The opinions in this review are my own. Links in this review may help to support this website and the content that I create. Thanks for your support!
Check out the free trial of Duda here!
Getting Started With Duda
One of the things that I like to see in a website builder are global controls for the design of your website. This gives you the ability to setup your fonts and main website colors and looks in one place. This can save you a ton of time and frustration when using a builders premade layouts.
Some of the website builders I have tested force you to manually change the fonts and colors anytime you added a pre-made layout. Super frustrating!
Duda offers nice global controls over the main settings of your website like fonts, background colors, image styling and buttons.
If you add a section from their section library it will automatically use your selected default fonts. This saves a ton of time. They could take this one step further and have text automatically switch between light and dark when you change the color of the background. This is something that Jimdo does which is a really nice feature.
Using The Website Builder
Building and designing a page is generally straight forward. There were a few things in the user interface that tripped me up, but most things are easy to understand.
One of the features that I liked was the ability to preview what one of their premade sections would look like on your page. If you hover between sections in the builder you will get the option to add a new section. You can start with a blank section or a whole bunch of pre-designed sections that you can use as starting points.
One thing that tripped me up on this was that to lock the setting into your page you need to look for the save button in the top bar.
Editing Text On Your Website
Editing text with duda is as simple as clicking on it and typing. When text is selected for editing you will also get a tool bar above the text with all of the standard text controls.
Adding Content
You can add content to any part of your website just by using the drag and drop functionality. The content pieces are under widgets. I did find this a bit confusing at first.
Here you have access to all of the basic content types like text, images and buttons. You also have some more advanced content types like maps, icons, videos, contact forms and a hole lot more.
Blogging
Blogging can be an important part of website marketing for some businesses. Duda offers some nice blogging functionality. It will also use the default style that you created in the global settings to style your blog. This is a nice touch, that surprisingly, not all builders offer.
You can even style and design the layout of your blog posts that will be the same across all blog posts. Nice touch!
You can add tags to group blog posts together. If you want to feature posts with a specific tag on a page you can do that using the recent posts widget and selecting that tag.
Working on your website on the go
Duda is designed for mobile editing. This means that you can work on your website from a phone or tablet.
I tested this out using my iPad and I found that it worked pretty well. I was able to add style and edit a section on my site with no problems.
The one issue I has was adjusting the color of phone icon in the mobile view. I couldn’t get the settings to show up. It just kept clicking the icon as if it was a menu item. But most other setting worked really well.
Responsive Design
Duda features responsive website design. It also allows you to view in one window a preview of what you website will look like on different devices.
You can also make adjustments to the mobile view of your website separately from the desktop and tablet view. This helps you to ensure that your website will look great on all devices.
I found that in my test that the builder did a good job of setting up my design on mobile with only minimal changes that I needed to make.
Conclusion
Duda was a big surprise for me. I found it to be a great balance between easy to use and having the power and features that people need. It’s not the easiest to use website builder, so far that crown goes to Jimdo, but Duda offers you a lot more control over the look and styling of your website.
Give Duda a try for free! See if it meets your needs.
Let me know what you think of Duda in the comments below.
