SitePad HostUpon

Introducing SitePad – Our New Free Website Builder

For over 10 years we’ve included RVSiteBuilder in all of our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans.  It was one of the first site builders for hosting providers to allow their customers to build, design and publish their own website with no coding skills required.  With a variety of templates and drag and drop functionality, RvSiteBuilder was a promising platform for novice users to deploy a website and manage it themselves.

Over the years we’ve evaluated various website builders to ensure we’re offering the latest and greatest tools to  our customers.  RvSiteBuilder always outperformed the others and just launched version 7 of their website builder a few months back.  After testing the new version of RVSiteBuilder we were quite underwhelmed with the product.  We were hoping for a more modernized interface and layout with greater emphasis on usability, compatibility and stylish template options but this was not the case.   The development of the product simply hasn’t kept pace with the modern requirements our clients expect from an easy yet powerful website builder.

Over the next 6 to 12 months we will be phasing out RvSiteBuilder across our shared hosting servers.  Customers who have built their website using RVSiteBuilder will continue to work but they will no longer be able to create new websites or edit existing projects.  The RvSiteBuilder icon will also be removed from cPanel within the 6 to 12 month period.

SitePad – Our New Modern Website Builder

We’re happy to announce that our new site builder, SitePad, is live across all of our shared hosting servers.  SitePad was developed by the same company who created Softaculous, the one-click script installer for popular software such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.  We had the opportunity to test SitePad for many months and decided it was the best website builder to offer our shared hosting and reseller hosting customers.  It’s a drag and drop website builder with over 350 themes that cover a wide variety of categories.  All of the themes are responsive which means they look great across all mobile devices and tablets by default.

SitePad  Features

  • Over 350 beautiful themes to choose from
  • Over 40 drag and drop widgets
  • All themes are responsive so they look perfect on mobile devices and tablets
  • One-click Publishing when you’re ready to launch
  • Static pages loaded in html so your website loads up to 4X faster
  • Customize your menu by adding, editing and deleting menu items and sub-menus
  • Social Media integration for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube & many more
  • Audio and Video support so you can insert media with a few clicks
  • Google Maps widget that displays your business location
  • Create contact forms with direct email functionality

SitePad has 3 easy steps to create a beautiful website that you can design and publish without any coding skills required.  Not only do you have access to over 350 themes but SitePad also includes 40+ widgets from image galleries, audio, video, rich-text, forms and even Google Maps integration.  Widgets are drag and drop modules that you can place anywhere on your theme.

Getting Started With SitePad

Step 1 – Choosing a theme

SitePad is located in cPanel under the ‘Software‘ section.  You’ll find a red icon labeled SitePad Website Builder.  Clicking the icon will launch the site builder in a new browser tab.  You’ll be greeted with an assistant in the top right corner to help guide you through the website builder interface.

SitePad in cPanel
SitePad icon inside cPanel

The first step is to select a theme you want to use as the base of your design.  Categories include blogs, business, portfolio, restaurants, travel, real estate, education, e-commerce and many more.  To select a theme, click the green Activate button on the themes thumbnail.  You can also view a live demo of the theme by clicking on the thumbnail image and then clicking the demo button.  This will open a live demo of the theme in a new tab so you can see what it looks like in full view.

sitepad themes
SitePad Theme Examples

Step 2 – Editing your design

Once you have activated your theme you’ll be taken to the main editor.  On the left side of the page you will see a variety of widgets you drag and drop into your design.  The themes default pages will be displayed and you can now start building your website!  Edit text, change colors and fonts, import images and videos and tons more with a few simple clicks.

sitepad widgets
SitePad Widgets Preview

At the top of the page you’ll find a drop-down menu showing you the current page you’re editing.  You can click the drop-down menu to switch between pages and also modify the header and footer of your website.  When selecting a different page to edit you’ll be prompted to save your current changes.  You can always save your changes by clicking the green Update button in the top right navigation menu.

Step 3 – Publishing your website

Once you’re ready to go live you can click the Publish button in the top right corner from any page.  You can publish your all of the pages you’ve designed or just the current page you’re on.  You’ll also find a preview button so you can see exactly what your website design looks like before you finalize and publish.  If you want to see what your design will look like on different devices you can do so by clicking the screen icon and then selecting the icon of the device.

After you publish your site you can always come back to the SitePad Website Builder to edit and update content.  You can check the SitePad Documentation for tutorials and guides.

Free Website Builder at HostUpon

All HostUpon customers on our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans have access to SitePad for free with their hosting package.  You can create a website using SitePad with unlimited pages as well.  The website builder has all the tools you need to build a beautiful, modern and responsive website at your own pace.  SitePad also adds new themes to make sure you have the latest design options.

If you’re currently using RvSiteBuilder we would highly recommend switching to SitePad as soon as possible.  If you have any questions about SitePad or the deprecation of RVSiteBuilder you can reach out to our support team.

 

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