Sometimes, you just need to get your content online, and you either don’t want to mess with blogging software, or you don’t have a lot of technical expertise in the area of web design. Online, do-it-yourself web publishing is hardly a new idea (think: Geocities in 1996), but new technologies have made publishing an attractive website accessible to the masses in the last few years. Two such web apps that I’ve become familiar with are Google Page Creator and a relatively new one, Weebly. Let’s take a look at them and compare what they have to offer.
Ease of Use
If you’re “rolling your own”, you want something that’s user-friendly and intuitive. Both Google and Weebly utilize an “AJAX” interface that allows you to drag and drop, and copy and paste your content into the page. I give the nod to Google for the intuitive layout; it just seems a little easier for me to navigate.
Quality Layouts
Again, both services provide attractive, if somewhat common layouts and designs for you to try on. Switching layouts is just a click away. One thing I noticed about Weebly was that the layout didn’t get updated as quickly as Google’s.
Hosting
Both services provide hosting with your page name as their subdomain. For example, yourname.theirdomain.com. Weebly has the option of downloading your layout so that you can upload it to your own domain. Kudos to them for this option.
Bang for the Buck
Well, both of these services are free. That said, I believe that a poor web creation service is worse than no web creation service at all. You’re better off not to have any content online at all if your viewers just see an outdates, poorly designed site. Both services score pretty high in my book; they are what they are.
Conclusion
Both of these services are a huge improvement from what we saw in this category just a few years ago. Even if you do have some web design skills, these aren’t a bad place to get some pages up quickly if you don’t have a lot of time. However, these services are aimed at the techno-novice. Content is king, and is this a good way to get yours up on the web.
November 19, 2006 at 7:04 pm
thanks for posting this. i’ll be checking both out…
April 2, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Thanks. Just the article I needed