This morning simple site builder Synthasite has a new and improved user interface that's different from any other site creation tool I've used. There are still themes to choose from, and widgets to drop in, but the site building tool has received a far more polished feel that I think new users will be a little more comfortable with.
The biggest change users will notice is that the tool now scales to the entire width of your monitor. Everything is still drag and drop, but now each element also includes right click contextual menus to tweak various bits of metadata or options.
Having just looked at Wix a few weeks back, there are definite similarities between the two, although I found Synthasite's theme directory to be more straightforward. There are now 60 different themes to choose from, and most have color pallets that you can pick to further tweak the look of your site.
Also new with this morning's redesign are some widgets you can plug into your page, like a new Flickr gallery builder that will put together a pretty svelte looking photo collection from your Flickr photo stream. Photos uploaded to your Synthasite account can now be edited within the tool using photo editor Picnik.
One thing to note is that the service is not using Amazon's S3 storage service to host the blogs like many other simple site hosts do. Instead it's using its own server farm that's located in the same part of the world. Synthasite's CEO Vinny Lingham tells me that he'd eventually like to move to a hybrid solution using several server solutions at once to make sure sites won't go down even if one server cluster does.
In the coming months the service will be expanding to cover niche sites like resumes, specialty blogs, and portfolio sites.
Synthasite's new page creator is a simple drag-and-drop affair. It'll also scale as wide as your monitor to let you see how your site will look live, as you change it.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Web site maker Wix opened up to everyone earlier today. What the site offers over some traditional tools is SEO optimization that somehow works despite the very flashy pages you end up with. All of these pages are created with an editor that gives you some really gorgeous results as long as you're willing to work within the constraints of the templates, or dig into the tools provided. One of them being a MySpace editor that will let you create very dynamic page elements with no coding knowledge required.
Wix's core product goes far beyond MySpace though, and is a surprisingly advanced site creator. There are templates for artists and musicians or simple start pages for people to put up their resumes---the kind of things you find on competing sites like Jimdo, SynthaSite, and Weebly. The idea is that anyone can build a page and push it live with just a click if they're proficient with something like Microsoft PowerPoint.
However, one thing I found to be missing is an undo button, meaning if you accidentally delete a page element (or an entire page) you have to go re-create it from scratch. This can be a total show stopper if you're working on something important, and should really be in every workflow-based Web application these days.
Like Blogger in its old days Wix has an explore section that's worth checking out. Here you can see what others have created with the tool then copy over the code to place it wherever you want. Missing however is the edit option, so hopefully you like what you see.
You can see a demo of the site creator after the break.
Making sites in Wix is easy peezy as long as you've worked with something like PowerPoint before.
(Credit: CNET Networks)... Read more
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