iRun Review: Design (3.5 stars)
Great Templates, but Not Enough Customization
On the surface iRun looks great for design because their templates look great. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that it's hard to customize the templates, which they have few of compared to other builders.
Sharp-Looking Templates If the Colors Match Your Logo
iRun has 180 that are divided into 23 categories. While this isn't many, we found the template designs to be of high quality and all of them looked sharp and modern. The designs certainly won’t embarrass your business.
Professional Templates for Your Business
Although the quality of the templates is high, you're limited when it comes to customizing the templates to your business. iRun does make it easy for you to upload a logo into the template, but it has to fit their recommended size and dimensions, or it won’t look right on the page. This is worse if the template’s colors don’t match the logo, since there's no option to change the color scheme. There’s also no way to change its position or size.
While you can’t alter the colors of the templates, you can change the header image within the editor. That means you can either hire a designer to create a header specific to your business, or you can design one yourself. If you want to use different colors to match your new header, you would have to pick a different template with the colors you want. It’s an unwieldy way to get what you want, but it is possible.
Good Variety of Page Layouts
While there’s not a lot you can do to customize the design of your website around your business, you can still switch between layout styles, altering how the image and text is placed on your pages. You’re given a choice of layouts as you create new pages.
Layout Choices Well Laid-Out
Home Page Layout Options – Looks Good, But Is Inflexible
The home page design is quite unique, but needs to be re-worked. It allows you to easily add feature options (polls, newsletter sign-ups, visitor or member login, products, downloads or featured links) in a convenient, very professional-looking layout. The problem is that you can't make your text the main feature on the page if you include any features other than the text itself. When you add any other features they're all given equal weight on the page. This makes it harder to communicate your marketing message.
Tasty-looking, but needs a little text.
Even if you do manage to make text the main focus of your page, the banner is so large that the textual content is pushed down so the visitor is forced to scroll just to see it. This makes people work too hard to find the information they need.
We also had problems setting up the visitor poll area on the home page (one of their standard options). Whenever we clicked to edit the poll, the web browser would freeze up. We never did figure out how to fix this. Drag and Drop Images from the Image Library.Expensive Design Program
Expensive Design Program
If you want a template with your logo integrated into it, you have the option of hiring iRun’s design team to create one with fees starting at a whopping $750 or one with a flash header starting at $900. The other option is that you can customize it yourself if you’re comfortable using a design program like Photoshop.
Good thing our generic logo meets iRun’s requirements
Drag 'n Drop Image Libary with Easy Re-Sizing
Like most website builders, iRun has a stock photo library with 1000 images to choose from in 25 categories. The stock photos themselves are all high quality and are available in three sizes, 100x100, 150x150, 200x200, all square in shape. There is also a drag and drop system that makes adding stock photo images onto your pages easy and fun. It reduces the number of steps to get the task done – always a good thing.
Choose Your Size, Then Drag ‘N Drop
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