Many of the big Web hosting services also offer website builders, sometimes simply rebranding a well-known service like Weebly or Wix, and sometimes delivering their own tool, as GoDaddy does. 1&1 Website Builder is an example of the latter, an in-house website-building tool. It can create sites that display well in mobile as well as standard desktop browsers. If you want to do more than one-off product selling, though, you need to opt for 1&1's separate Online Store service. For sites that don't require storefronts, 1&1 Website Builder offers a solution that's low-cost, but less intuitive and groundbreaking than some competitors' offerings, and at times even a bit frustrating.

Starting Up
A Basic 1&1 Website Builder site costs just 99 cents per month for the first year and $6.99 per month thereafter. At this level, you get a 10-page site with 50 design template choices, and your site displays a Powered by 1&1 badge. Moving up to a $9.99-per-month Plus plan removes the branding and increases your page limit to 500, while offering 1&1's full selection of 200 design templates, and loads of Web apps. For ecommerce features, the 1&1 Online Store option starts at $14.99 per month. For the same price, you can get 1&1 Website Builder's Pro plan, which adds a stock image library, SSL security, a custom HTML option, and a 1-click Facebook site. There's no free account level like you can get with Weebly and Wix, but there is a 30-day free trial.

To get a fuller taste of the service than the limited entry level, I tested with the Plus plan. In the first of several counterintuitive moves, 1&1 assigns you a long account number (most builders simply have you sign in with your email address and a password). After you choose a plan, then comes the familiar selection of a design template. 1&1's choices are pleasant, but not as slick as those of Squarespace, Strikingly, Weebly, or Wix. I like that the samples show you mobile as well as desktop view of a sample site. After I chose a template, the site builder loaded. And loaded. And loaded. It took several minutes—longer than any other site builder I've tested. A plus: you can change templates later, and doing so doesn't take as long.

Interface
The site-building interface is pretty standard, though its toolbar is along the right side instead of the more-common left side rail. I like how the Getting Started button takes you to a form where you can enter your personal or business details and contact info, which then populates the site automatically. Getting Started displays a clickable list of the other things you should do when creating your site, too, including adjusting the layout and style, managing pages, inserting elements, and choosing an Internet address.

The first time you use a site-building tool in 1&1 Website Builder, you see tooltips showing you how to use it. For example, the Insert Elements panel's tooltip explains that you must drag and drop an element onto your page to insert it. Template page elements like logos and photos display a big plus sign telling you to add content.

Like Squarespace and Strikingly, the 1&1 builder doesn't let you place page elements anywhere you'd like, instead enforcing a responsive design that works well in mobile browsers. But 1&1 restricts what you can do on-page with elements more than most builders—you can't even resize a content box or image by dragging on an edge. A blue bar with the name of your selected element appears to make it clear where you can drop the content. Elements include all the usual items: text, images, links, social network buttons, tables, lines, and spacers. You can't just hit the Delete key to remove an element, as you can with some competing services, but every added element shows a Trash Can icon when you hover over it.

At the very bottom of the Elements pane are column layout choices, which seem like they belong in the Layout or Style panels. Elements also include an odd mix of third-party Web services such as Act!, Dropbox, Target, and Skype. You also get Soundcloud and YouTube options, as well as Flash video, but clicking through to Web Apps, you see a wide spectrum of Web content, including DailyMotion, LinkedIn, Yelp, and many more you probably haven't heard of. Some elements don't display actual content in the site builder's editing mode, but only in Preview mode. In Preview mode, a slider lets you choose between what online viewers see and what you're building.

In addition to switching site templates, the Layout panel lets knowledgeable people enter their own HTML. The Design button opens color and font options, and lets you change your site's background image.

From the Manage Pages button, you can add seven page types, including blank, contact, and news. It's a bit strange that these page types don't have the standard page names such as About, Blog, and so on. And a couple of them, Garden/Design/DIY and Books/Music/Arts, add multiple subpages. You can easily create nested page navigation by dragging and dropping a page entry in this view.

Undo and Redo buttons work for everything you do in the site builder, including layout and template changes. This is a bigger deal than it sounds like, since some site builders' (like Weebly) undo only work for specific actions. On the other hand, you can close an editing page with no warning that you lose your work; other builders show a confirmation dialog before you exit. This isn't great.

Working With Photos
With 1&1 Website Builder, you can upload multiple images at once, align them to taste, save them in custom online folders, and even edit them with Adobe's excellent Aviary online photo editor. Photo Galleries can be simple grids or auto-playing slideshows with filmstrip navigation along the bottom. You can add captions, Alt text, and, of course, outbound links. Missing are more fancy customizations like rounded corners and custom gallery views, which you find in some other site builders, such as Wix.

Blogging
There's no toolbar button or page type in 1&1 Website Builder named Blog, but you could use the News page type. Sort of. Better still is to add the Blog Web app from the Add Web Apps menu. This actually comes from 1&1, and there's even a mobile app from which you can enter posts. You can only add one blog element to a page, and to add posts you click on the element and click on Create Post, which appears in between the top post and its comments. When I did this, the site hung, displaying a spinning throbber that wouldn't go away.

You can add text, photos, and video to your post and disable comments if you prefer. There's no concept of saving drafts or scheduling posts: Once you complete a blog post, it's live on your site.

Mobile
Without your doing anything, 1&1 Website Builder delivers a mobile version of your site. Clicking on the Mobile Preview button presents an emulator showing you how the site appears and functions in the smaller screens. You get a mobile-friendly dropdown menu and a single-column width for text and images. The mobile site even allowed placing phone calls and composing emails on both the iPhone 6s and Lumia 950 that I tested on.

1&1 Website Builder automatically hides content such as some Web plugins that won't display well on mobile, but you can override that behavior. You can also customize your mobile site to include Action buttons for calling, emailing, and getting map directions.

Commerce
Even though 1&1 Website Builder isn't meant for online selling, you can still add a PayPal Mini Shop to your site. That's a nice contrast with WebsiteBuilder.com, which doesn't let you collect any money at all unless you upgrade to a commerce plan. You can add a Mini Shop to any page, and it even includes shopping cart and checkout functionality.

Publishing and Site Statistics
Unlike some builders, 1&1 Website Builder doesn't publish your site until you specifically issue the command. Meanwhile, it shows an Under Construction page. When you do switch from Maintenance Page to Website, a congratulatory dialog shows social sharing options, but not your site's URL, as most other builders do. Even stranger is that there's no link to your live site in the editing interface. Once you turn the site on, you can't save drafts of edits; changes you make to the site are instantly live. So why bother having this unpublished mode?

The site you start building isn't automatically connected to your domain name; with most builders, choosing the domain occurs at the very beginning of the building process. Though it's not too hard to connect your site to the included URL, it's just an extra step that you have to figure out. After a couple hours more editing, my site ceased to exist on the Internet, replaced by a 1&1 placeholder page—even though the builder interface indicated that it was live. Later, the site would show up in some computers and the placeholder in others. What's really strange is that the placeholder showed up in a tab of the browser in which I was successfully building the site.

On your 1&1 Website Builder site dashboard is a 1&1 SiteAnalytics panel, which serves up a decent selection of site-visit data. It's refreshing to see after reviewing some services that offer no built-in traffic analysis. Unlike Google Analytics, which some site builders require you to set up, you don't have to wait a day to see your traffic; 1&1 SiteAnalytics shows you info on the current day. You can see referring pages, most-frequently visited pages, exit pages, and technical info such as user operating system and browser. You can also have a synopsis automatically emailed to you.

The One and Only?
You can certainly get a DIY website online using 1&1 Website Builder. But all along the way the service makes it just a bit more cumbersome to do things that in other services are no-brainers. For a more streamlined experience, look to DudaOne, Squarespace, Weebly,  or our Editors' Choice for website builders, Wix.