A Look at SynthaSite

The final free web page building tool I know about is SynthaSite. This will end the series about free online web building tools that include Weebly, SiteKreator, and Webnode.

I’ve been writing corresponding how-to articles about each of these tools for eHow. If you are interested in exploring these sites from a personal use prospective and want to see screen shots and step by step instructions, visit my eHow page.

To summarize the free online tools, I found Weebly to be the easiest and most beginner friendly. Weebly has a huge array of widgets to add Google maps, RSS feeds, Flickr images and other content to a page. I found the site for today, SynthaSite (still in Beta), to also be very easy for a beginner. But SynthaSite has some features that would appeal to someone with a bit of knowledge of both HTML and CSS. Therefore, it was my favorite among the four. None are perfect and none come close to achieving results anything like you would expect from a professional designer and developer.

SynthaSite is free for everything. It uses a drag and drop interface. You drag text areas, images, and columns into a page. There are many page designs to choose from. The pages are posted free with a URL leading to a subdomain at synthasite.com. Or you can choose to download the pages and publish them elsewhere.

Each thing you add as a widget to a page opens up a Properties panel where you can do some CSS if you like. Right now it’s only setting top, right, bottom and left margins for text and images. Although I think the Properties panel should offer a way to add alt text to an image, it does not. To be fair, none of the other sites I tested let you add alt text either. But SynthaSite’s more sophisticated options with its Properties panel would work well for this, and seems like a logical addition to the interface. SynthaSite has an HTML widget that will accept any HTML (and inline style rules) you might want to add that way.

Since I went ahead and published a demo test site, I was able to do some testing. SynthaSite did much better on HTML and CSS validation tests than the other sites tested in this series.

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A Look at SiteKreator

I’m on a streak, testing out all the free online web page building tools. The lastest is SiteKreator.

My overall impression of SiteKreator is that the free version is very limited when compared with Webnode and Weebly. To get services you may want you have to pay anywhere from $20 to $40 a month. For that kind of money, you’d be better off doing it the old fashioned, pre-Web 2.0 way by creating the site from scratch.

SiteKreator is a bit different in approach from the others. It isn’t drag and drop. It uses tiny (tiny!) icons with drop down menus. The M icon lets you add menu items (and therefore, new pages). The A icon lets you add areas that may contain text, images, or files. When you have an area on a page, you use a T icon to edit or add to the area. The control panel is revealed by clicking a P icon. Page properties and your account info are under the P icon.

Although I played around with it quite a while, I didn’t actually go ahead and activate the account. (You must respond to an email to activate.) Therefore, I cannot give you any information about how well the page performed in the browser when published and whether it could pass any validation tests. Based on a few runs through the validator with the Sample pages they provide, I’m fairly safe in saying that they would not perform well. Realistically, however, someone wanting a free tool with a URL coming from free hosting probably doesn’t care about HTML purity or accessibility.

Several days ago I saw a blog post that said SiteKreator was a Dreamweaver killer. There is no danger of that.

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A look at Webnode

I received some email (Apparently, I had comments shut off for some posts. I think I’ve fixed that.) after my previous post about Weebly that encouraged me to take a look at Webnode. The email from Nicholas even suggested I take a look at this post by a teacher who enthusiastically endorsed Webnode.

I did take a look. Here’s what I think.

Webnode provides a powerful set of online tools that allow you to create a website absolutely free. The site can be published free on a subdomain at webnode, or it can be published to a domain of your own. To publish on your own domain, a novice web page creator going to Webnode would need a basic understanding of FTP settings and DNS information prior to signing on with Webnode. If you don’t already own a domain name, Webnode will arrange the purchase.

If you wanted to create a website, but couldn’t afford to buy an expensive tool like Dreamweaver, Webnode would be an alternative. That said, I found it to have a steep learning curve. The interface was not obviously intuitive—at least to my mind. Any template you pick has a predetermined set of pages that have to either be edited or deleted. There’s already a variety of content on the suggested pages that must be either edited or deleted so that your own content and images can be added. You can add your own template, which implies that you already have web design experience and tools at hand. You can also edit the CSS files, which implies that you already have CSS experience. It seems to me that anyone wanting to create a website using online drag and drop tools would be lacking in such background experience, but maybe I’m misunderstanding who the target audience is for this site.

Webnode gives you email and stats, RSS, and handy widgets like PayPal options, maps, image galleries and other handy drag and drop goodies. It has a lot to offer, but demands a lot of effort from the user.

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Related Posts: Weebly, Site Kreator, SynthaSite

A Look at Weebly

I recently tried out Weebly. It’s a site that offers drag and drop web page creation, along with free hosting of the pages you create. You can publish the pages you create on a domain of your own choosing.

They offer a blog among the choices as to what you can make with their interface, but if you add a blog to a site, it must be hosted at Weebly to work.

I was trying it out because I was writing a how-to article about it for eHow. I made a test web site, which reflects my quickly done effort while testing for the eHow article.

It is easy. Very easy. But if you run an HTML validator on the test site I made, you find 48 validation errors on the first page. The blog, where I didn’t go as wild dragging and dropping widgets and elements onto the page only (only?) has HTML 22 errors.

I didn’t make an effort to create anything real that I would use. I just tried out the elements to see if they fulfilled the promise of letting an inexperienced user create and publish their own information in a web page. Weebly does that. However, I don’t think it provides any useful fodder for education in web design. If you are teaching programming and want to look at a smoothly working example of a web 2.0 site, it could be instructive.

Are sites like Weebly going to eliminate the need for instruction and education in web design by making it so simple to get published on the web that even a kid could do it? I don’t think so. They have a place, a niche. For example, if you were getting married and wanted a short-term, fast and easy site to store information about the wedding and its related events, maps, gift registration sites, and such info, Weebly would be a solution. But Weebly is limited. Which means a solid grounding in the web development nuts and bolts is still necessary for most web site creators.

ADDENDUM: July 27, 2010. Weebly made news today with a new drag and drop image editor called Image Perfect. You can read about it at TechCrunch.

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Related Posts: SynthaSite, SiteKreator, and Webnode

Plugin Review: Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress (Beta)

Yahoo! announced a new WordPress plugin called Shortcuts. It promises to “boost your blog” by adding desirable content to your posts. My first impression was that it was one of those annoying things that pop up unwanted content all over a page. But I looked a little deeper into it and decided to try it out.

I normally hesitate to try out things in beta, but for the sake of testing this thing, I’m giving it a go.

The plugin menu in WordPressDownload the plugin here. It requires WordPress 2.2 or higher. When installed and activated, it adds a menu to your WordPress Write Post form. When the plugin finds something to add, it shows up in this Yahoo! Powered Shortcuts menu.

Even though there’s only 1 shortcut at this point in this article, I want to see what it is. To do that, I click the Review this Post button. A new page opens where I do the reviewing.

It turns out that the shortcut is an offer to search the web for the term “WordPress.” When you are working on the Review page, you can see what is suggested by the shortcut, and decide whether or not to remove that shortcut.

The options for a suggested shortcutI don’t think my readers need any help finding out how to locate WordPress on the web, so I choose to remove that shortcut.

In order to get more suggested shortcut offers from the plugin, I’m going to write a couple of paragraphs about SXSW Interactive.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference will take place in March 2008 in Austin, TX. The schedule for this year is gelling, with Henry Jenkins set to deliver the opening remarks. Other interesting looking program offerings include “Getting Unstuck II: From Desktop to Device (Liz Danzico)” and “Africa 2.0: Affecting Change Using Technology (G. Kofi Annan)”.

The Conference is held in the Austin Convention Center, downtown in Austin and close to the famous music scene on Sixth Street (and everywhere else) around this Live Music Capital of the World. Just across the river from the Convention Center you can see the statue of Austin bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan.

OK. Adding that content brought me up to four suggested shortcuts. I decide to keep one, a map of Austin that you see on mouse over, and another suggesting a web search for Kofi Annan. I probably won’t use that much, but I’m leaving it here as an example.

Why no offer to search for Henry Jenkins, Liz Danzico or Stevie Ray Vaughan? If I think you are going to be interested in a person, it seems like my responsibility as a writer to provide you with the relevant link (e.g., Liz Danzico) rather than making you go through the intermediate process of searching yourself.

There was an offer to search on Austin Convention Center, but no offer of a map to it. I removed that one.

The final option for added content from the shortcuts is images from Flickr. I found a SXSW Interactive Image and added it. Based on the words in this article, the shortcut to Flickr had preloaded images of the Austin Converntion Center, but it was easy to search for SXSWi instead.

One thing I didn’t see yet was an offer to create a “badge” from some of the content that the plugin flagged. So I’ll add some content with an address in it, hoping to trigger a shortcut to a map that can convert to a badge to add to this post.

My Tai Chi instructor is Sifu Dug from the Lotus Dragon Authentic Kung Fu and Tai Chi studio at 1805 San Pedro Dr. NE, Albuquerque, NM.

Yep, that worked. When I go back to Review this Post, there’s an option for the address I entered. Now I can either choose to suggest a map as I did above to Austin, TX, or add the map to the page as a badge.

You, as reader, can see the results displayed as a dashed blue line under any term with a shortcut attached. If you hover over it, you can elect to follow the search, click the map link or badge, or find the owner of the photo from Flickr.

It was very easy to use. Some WordPress plugins take an extra step, but not this one. Just install and activate. And in spite of the fact that it’s still in beta, it worked great. There is a noticeable slowdown in Save time with shortcuts added to the post. Most of what I added shows up in code view as simply spans with classes. For example:

<span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1197569011_6">1805 San
Pedro Dr. NE, Albuquerque, NM</span>

The map used an embed tag. The Flickr image is a simple link with a clickable image.

But how helpful is it? I rejected a lot of what it suggested. Unwanted stuff is easy to remove. Some of what it offered, such as the map to the Tai Chi studio seem really helpful. But I’m not sure I like the things that pop up in your way on mouse over. Sometimes pop ups are plain irritating, not informative.

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Useful links for today

WikiMatrix – Compare Them All is a wiki comparison tool. There is help in choosing a wiki, a comparison matrix, and a forum.

A series of reports on the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace at Yale by 43(B)log begins with Reputation Economies, the day’s first panel. Blogger Rebecca Tushnet also posted about the second panel in Reputation economies, Panel II: Privacy and Reputational Protection. Her post on the third panel is Reputation economies, Panel III: Reputational Quality and Information Quality. The fourth report is Reputation economies, Panel IV: Ownership of Cyber-Reputation. Rebecca Tushnet was a member of this panel. Fascinating discussions at what must have been a remarkable symposium. In my opinion, it’s worth your time to read all four posts.

Today’s useful links

An educational technology dead end? examines content management systems and related issues.

HTML Design Principles is a draft from the W3C of HTML5. This is not a recommendation and will change. They want comments by email at public-html-comments@w3.org. Keep in mind that WHATWG has an opinion on this issue, too.

The Email Standards Projects is a subgroup within the Web Standards Project, working to get standard applications of HTML in email applications. They are looking for help.

Zooming Backgrounds in IE 7 discusses a problem and solution for those using faux columns as a design technique. Seems in IE 7, a background image doesn’t zoom along with the rest of the page, causing a problem with faux columns.

Five ways to shape the soul of the Internet by Alexandra Samuel contains thought provoking gems such as, “Give your attention to sites, people and organizations that reflect your true values. . . . every page you load is a vote to have more of that kind of content, or more of that kind of interaction.”