Webware

After I covered Weebly, I got a note from the creator of Jimdo, another easy-to-use Web site creator tool. I took it for a quick spin, and I'm somewhat impressed. It has a lot of very strong features, it makes pretty sites, and it's free.

The service is especially good at handling photos. It does a great job displaying photos that you upload to it, and it also integrates beautifully with Flickr. There are good options for how the galleries are displayed, and when you zoom into a picture, it displays over the page instead of taking you off-site. It does great slide shows.

Jimdo has a clean site editor and makes pretty pages.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Signing up for the service is really easy and creating new pages is a snap as well. Like other modern site design and hosting services, it has a collection of attractive templates, and you can apply one, and change the whole look of your site, in an instant.

It took me a few more minutes to get comfortable with Jimdo's site-building interface than it did with Weebly, and there are some rough edges that you might find frustrating. It's run out of Germany, and there are foreign-looking elements to it. For instance, spelling on the site is British ("favourite" vs. "favorite") when it's not German (the "forgot your password" text is "Passwort vergessen?" I couldn't find a way to resize my site's title graphic once it was imported. And while the site will display RSS feeds, in my tests it did not display a feed's pictures. All minor things, but frustrating.

This is a good service for creating a quick site to document a trip or other event, or to prototype a simple personal or business site. I don't think it's mature enough yet to put a U.S.-based small business on, but it's worth keeping track of. The basic Jimdo service is free. If you pay 5 euros a month for Jimdo Pro, you can use your own domain name (instead of site.jimdo.com), you get more storage, and the ads are removed.

If you ever find yourself needing to throw a basic site up on the Web quickly, it would be worth a few minutes of your time to check out Weebly, the 2.0 version of which launched today. It is a free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set, but as a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good), or just start typing on the default template. Adding elements like pictures (via uploads or a Flickr gallery module), YouTube videos, and Google maps to a page is very simple, and adding pages to your site is also easy.

Weebly's template library is a snap to use.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Changing the look and feel of a site is easier with this service than with any other site designer I've seen. You just go to the "Designs" tab and roll your mouse over the templates. Your whole page changes on the screen, but it isn't locked in until you click to select. It's like changing formatting in Office 2007: intuitive and fun.

But here's the bad news: The limitations in this service will drive you insane. You can't put a picture into a block of text after the fact--there are separate module types for text and for text-plus-image. You can't put a headline or a caption on an embedded object (like a Google map or YouTube video); you have to use a separate headline module. And if you want your site to have its own domain name instead of a Weebly.com URL (like our test site, phosphorphresh.weebly.com), Weebly leaves all the configuring to you and your registrar.

There are also missing content types. There's no blog module, no discussion forum, and, for that matter, no community features at all except for a contact form module.

I hate to be mean, because Weebly looks like the beginning of a great service, but, at the moment, I'd say it's a really good tool for a kid doing a book report. It could also be useful for an entrepreneur looking to set up a very temporary site while the team builds a real site for the business.

I'd like to see Weebly brought in under the wing of a large company (like Google) where they'd get the resources to extend on this tool's potential.

See also: Microsoft Office Live, Google Page Creator, SiteKreator, SquareSpace, HomeStead, etc.

Weebly editor (left) and resulting live site (right).

(Credit: CNET Networks)