Boomer app review
Boomer review
• This approach makes Boomer a one-of-a-kind app.
Official website: boomer.co
Exploration
They propose a 6 steps process
1. Select a type of website: Business, Online Store and Others.
• Live Chat
• Live Review
• Make Appointments
• Sell Online
• Collect Payments
Note: To access the next theme (if any), just swipe from right to left.
Note: A valid phone number and an email address are required when you first publish your website. Later on, if you need to connect from another device, Boomer will send you a SMS containing a one-time password.
Building a website with Boomer
Your content is classified into types, and each type of content
is displayed on a specific page.
The home page is built automatically
from top items typed as "What's new", "Gallery", etc... with clever
"View All" button to jump to the corresponding inner page. Building your
own website is as simple as replacing the template pictures and texts
with your own content.
After sign up, a dashboard is displayed on screen. This dashboard is in fact the first item of a long menu which shows up when you click on the top-left hamburger icon ☰
1. Dashboard
The dashboard mainly displays some traffic statistics. Recent events, such as chat messages sent from website visitors, online reviews... also appear on the dashboard.
2. Manage Website
A faithful desktop or mobile preview of the website is displayed, along with a sub-menu at the bottom of the screen:
- Design: Primary Color, Secondary Color, Font, Chat Animation, Change Theme.
- Settings: You can rename the pages of your website, and hide those that are not relevant for your project. You can also setup a domain name, SEO tags, payments, taxes, e-commerce and invoices.
3. Messages
In this screen, you can read and answer chat messages sent from your website.
4. Reviews
In this screen, you can read the reviews written on your website. If you mark a review as testimonial, it will be displayed on your website, at the bottom of the home page.
Note: To leave a review, a visitor needs to be logged in either on Google, Facebook or Boomer.
In this screen, you can view and process the orders received from your online store.
6. Invoice
In this screen, you can prepare and send invoices to you customers (via your email app).
7. About Us
In this screen, you define the text that will be displayed in the "About Us" section of your website, along with an image or YouTube video.
8. Offers
In this screen, you can define the text and pictures, and parameters of great deals you want to promote on your website and social media.
9. Catalog
In this screen, you can describe your products (text + pictures), their prices and availabilities.
10. Gallery
In this screen, you can select the pictures to show on the gallery section of your website.
11. What's New
In this screen, you can define posts (text + picture) about the latest news.
12. Social Sharing
In this screen, you can link your Facebook Profile, Facebook Page or Twitter account.
13. Add-ons
In this screen, you can setup a payment gateway (PayPal or Stripe), buy or link a domain name, and setup Google Analytics code for advanced traffic statistics.
14. Managers
In this screen, you can give some permission to a person you trust, so that he/she can help you manage your website.
Note: Managers are identified by their mobile phone numbers.
15. Subscription
In this screen, you can change your plan to access more features and bandwidth.
16. Your account
In this screen, you can add a portrait photo to your profile and change your registered name or email address.
Conclusion and opinion about Boomer
Boomer applies quite strictly the "filling a form" approach.
It takes care of the core of the website building process (i.e.
organizing content in order to create a website that makes sense to
internet users and search engines).
When you create a website with
Boomer app, you have to 2 roles:
- as a content provider, you fill Boomer with all the necessary content (upstream process),
This approach makes Boomer a one-of-a-kind app.
If you feel that you need a website for your business but do not want to learn anything about website creation process, Boomer is a good app to try out. On the other hand, if you already have a vision of what your website should look like, you will probably have a hard time building your website with this app.Ease of use
★★☆☆☆
If you have some experience with a major website builder, try to forget it before you start using Boomer app. If you have no experience, be ready to get confused. You will have to fill the system with data and then check the preview. Trial and error process (or reverse engineering of the templates) is the only way to learn what Boomer app does with your data.
Evaluation
Features
★★★☆☆
Boomer app provides a very integrated solution for an online retail business: product catalog of course, but also marketing, order and invoice management... and it is also available on Android devices. Once your website has been published, a historical line chart is displayed in the app dashboard so that you can track the number of visit at a glance. If you need more advanced statistics, you can enable the Google Analytics add-on.
It's not possible to customize much the layout of the template you have selected... but you can easily change the template and pretend that you have a brand new website!
No dynamic map (like Google Maps) is supported, which is quite annoying if your website promotes a retail shop.
Clarity
★★★★☆
Your task is clear enough: fill the various forms with your own data. On most screen, in the top-right corner, there is a question mark icon providing some information about the corresponding function. We find the help provided there quite helpful, especially for e-commerce related screens, because some setup is required in the Manage Website / Settings section. If you need some extra support, you can write an email to Boomer support team (from the Your Account section).
If you carefully study how the template you have chosen is built from the editor data, after a while you will find the app quite self explanatory. Anyway, replacing the template data in the forms with your own stuff is all what you can do.
Design
★★★★☆
Boomer templates look great on mobile phones and on computers, and you can actually generate a site that is a replica of the template you chose. In the Manage Website section, there is even a handy Computer preview, so that you can feel how your website will look like on a computer.
While several dozen fonts are available, it is a pity that you can select only one. So, if you select a fancy font for your titles, it will also apply to all the plain text paragraphs on your website, and impact its legibility.
Lightness
★☆☆☆☆
The published website (without the AMP option) is a bit sluggish to load. The website Think with Google reports a 7s loading time on 3G. In Thailand (where I am located), you should expect no less than a 10s loading time with a decent ADSL connection.
Moreover, the description metadata is the same on all pages (based on "About Us" text and on the keywords set in Manage Website / Settings section), so that it is not possible to dedicate some of your website pages to a very specialized topic in order to rank well on search engines for a given set of keywords (long tail strategy).
Chance to complete
★★☆☆☆
If you want to make your website yourself, you will probably get frustrated with Boomer because this app gives you very little control on the generated website. And if you do not want to make your website yourself, in most cases, you'd rather ask someone else to take care of this task for you. If you don't know any web designer and fall in love with one of the Boomer templates, then give it a try.
