Hello, and welcome to my review of the website Yola. Yola is used to create professional-looking businesses without any complicated code (although you can use it). Almost anyone can create a website on Yola, no previous experience with web design is needed. In fact, I think that Yola was designed for inexperienced people looking for a quick, easy, and cheap website.

Features:

What you just went through is an example of a button. They are one way to navigate through your website, though not the only way. If you look up at the top right corner, you can see another way to navigate through a website: a navigation bar. It's usually used to quickly find main pages. You should be pretty familiar with it, as its on almost every website. Below are a few examples.

The only other way to navigate that I've come across is by using regular links. Click either here or there : http://ethanyola.yolasite.com/Design.php

Yola has a limited amount of design features. For example, you may have noticed a background on my previous pages. It's pretty easy to change a background, along with a few other settings, which I will show you below.

When making a website it's nice to have some type of creative control. If you had a limited amount of options then the site wouldn't feel like it would be yours, although it may look nice. Yola has a few different design features, a lot can be found in almost any ordinary text editing software, though. Here are a few examples of the design elements you can include in your website:

Different colors

LOTS  OF  FONTS

"A block quote (for quoting someone)"

Columns

To compare things

Pros

  • With Yola it is cheap and easy to make a website
  • Yola looks professional
  • Sites made with Yola:
  • Minor features (music, gallery, forms)

Cons

  • Yola doesn't have many features unless you pay
  • You lose creative control with Yola
  • Yola design broken into parts, less features
  • Some minor annoyances (hard to delete objects, no indented bullet points, have to use HTML for non-YouTube videos which destroys the purpose of Yola)

How can we fix the cons?

I think that a lot of the problems could be fixed by making Yola completely free. I understand that Yola needs to make money one way or another, but so does every other free website. They usually thrive off of ads, which is what I propose Yola starts doing. Even though ads can get a bit annoying, people would still use the app. Just look at YouTube, which still rakes in millions of dollars a year despite having a ton of ads and being free.

The other problems with Yola could easily be fixed by either adding something to the app, or doing a simple bit of coding to fix a bug. For example, to fix Yola's design being broken into sections Yola could just not break it into sections. It seems like it would be a lot easier to not break it into sections than to break it into sections, however, so maybe I just don't hold a popular opinion. The bug that makes it hard to delete objects could be fixed by giving the objects more space between each other, as that caused collision. The other two problems, no indented bullet points and no non-YouTube sourced videos, just need to be added in.

Real world applications

Yola, in my opinion, was created as an alternative to complicated and time-consuming code. This is because everything is made much simpler to use. Also, on the homepage of Yola it says, "Create a professional, free, website in minutes." 

Another possible use for Yola is to act as a Scratch for web design. Just like how Scratch is used to introduce budding programmers to programming logic, Yola could be used to introduce budding web designers to web design. However, I don't know if this would work as well because most of the features of Yola are obvious. The reason Scratch works so well is because it introduces the logic of programming, which I don't really see with Yola.