Nosillacast
A technology geek podcast
Allison's Freeweb Page
At the All Things Digital conference, I did find a couple of interesting tools. The first one is freewebs.com. I had the luxury of a guided tour of freewebs by the president and CEO, Shervin Pshevar. He was passionate about his product which was infectious. he created this site to allow anyone to create a website with no experience whatsoever.
Two doors to start - the simple and easy way, or I already know html, and I want a place to host my site for free. I chose door number one. Entered info on my (full name, description of the site, category of computers/internet). Next is to choose the look from 33 templates - all with color bars next to them to change the look just from a color perspective. I chose the Waveform template and dark blue as the color option. Time to enter the site for the first time - but it says it's compatible with IE 5.5 or Firefox on the Mac, and IE or Firefox on Windows. I'm using Camino, which is sort of a Firefox derivative, let's go in anyway!
The next section offers to let you add more features, with a button to get to see the site. the template is beautiful, but of course I've got nothing in there. There's a really really annoying blinking banner on the edit page - the kind that flickers so much you're pretty sure it's going to induce an epileptic fit if you're not careful! Add more features let's me choose Web Polls, Counters, ShoutBoxes, Blog, Webforms, Albums and Guestbooks. this page has a DIFFERENT annoying blinking "winner" thing at the top. wish they'd cut that thing out. I did get to a point where the add switched to ask.com which was NOT blinking and it was such a relief!
I chose to add a Blog next. They give you a quick paragraph on what a blog is, and then you're off and running. They have a lot of very intuitive formatting options, explanations if you hover over the options. I was able to add a picture to my blog, upload it easily. it gave me options to wrap the text, and to give it some padding. I forgot to do the padding, and after the fact I wasn't able to figure out how to change it. Creating this blog entry now changed my home page to have a home button and a "my blog" button under the banner. Ads were running across the top, but I was able to change the color so they blended in better and weren't so intrusive. the very top left says "Freewebs" followed by the site name - but evidently NosillaCast was longer than they wanted because I got NosillaCas... instead of the full name. not a big deal since NosillaCast is printed huge in the banner right below it, but kind of odd behavior.
I decided to try adding a page to the site, and I used the content from my recent post on the 2nd half of the Digital conference. I had to mess with the html links a little bit, but not much. This was the first place I noticed Camino not working properly - the "done" or possibly "save" button had no text in it but it was the only unlabeled thing, and I couldn't find done or save anywhere else so I figured it out. that's when I found an insurmountable problem with Camino and freewebs - in order to access the pages I'd created, there were links to click on but nothing happens in Camino. I tried the same thing in Firefox and it worked fine, so I'll work in there for the rest of this review.
When I clicked on the home link to edit it, it took me to see what it looked like, but now I had no options to edit the page. This is the first time it wasn't really obvious what to do, and there wasn't a link back to freewebs to edit my document. I clicked on the freewebs name in the upper left, but it took me to their homepage with the login options, and the other links like 'build a webite' all took me to ads for other services outside of freewebs. That's when I realized that freewebs had opened my site in another window, and that the other window was still there with all the editing options.
I played around a bit with changing the picture for the banner, and that worked easily. It gave me the option to optimize the photo I chose for the web (that's a constant problem that people use photos that are very high resolution, they take forever to print on screen and no one can tell the difference. the graphics did get kind of tangled up there - the text about optimizing the web was on top of the name of the file I was uploading and hanging off the right on top of the button. It didn't stop the link from working, just looked lame.
Next I decided to figure out what a Web Form was, so I clicked on the big button for that. I think this part could benefit of one minor change that would make it work more intuitively. The good part is there's again a quick explanation of what this buttton does - it's a way to have a little form to allow people to submit an email to you. this sounded cool, but it didn't have an obvious way to start it - turns out you have to go over to the site manager, click add a page, then change the pull down to Web Form. I figured that out, but it turns out new accounts are essentially on probation for the first 7 days, so I wasn't able to play yet. I can understand the need for this, so I'll go back and play with it later.
Next I tried the Photo Album, and over all it worked very well, with a couple of issues. I had the option to upload photos and again to optimize or web - but this time the text falling all over the button made it really hard to actually hit upload. It actually took me 4 or 5 clicks before I got it. After uploading a pic, you're able to put a title and some text for the pic, but when it ended up in the album none of that text shows, so I'm not sure where it ends up. I put 3 pics in, and I was able to intuitively change the order - great huge green up down arrows were perfect. I did discover that my earlier optimism about what "optimize for web" meant was wrong - one of the pics I uploaded was a 4MP file, and that's exactly how it uploaded. That's kind of unfortunate, if this is really for newbies, they're never going to know how to shrink photos for the web, and the proliferation of higher and higher resolution digital cameras will only make this problem get worse.
The last thing I did was add this content to the home page, and while it looks perfect in the editor page (links work, no break symbols showing), the actual site had all the html showing! I didn't know how to fix it, since it looked great in the editor page. I waited a while and went back to the site, and it had magically fixed itself. Hmmmm...I know I had hit refresh, so that wasn't it! Oh well, it's working now.The last thing I did was add this content to the home page, and while it looks perfect in the editor page (links work, no break symbols showing), the actual site has all the html showing! Not sure how to fix it, since it looks great in the editor page.
I added a guestbook for fun, and it was instantly created, intuitive and easy. Overall I'd say that the freewebs service is about as easy as I can imagine to create a quick blog/website with very low knowledge levels. With the few minor changes i suggested it would be just about perfect! Check it out yourself at freewebs.com
If you want to check out the site I created as I wrote this, check it out at http://freewebs.com/nosillacast and let me know what you think by signing the guestbook if you like!
This is a test of the freewebs service, I recommend you give it a whirl, it's a lot of fun!