Designing a site for yourself or your family needn't be a confusing affair, and fortunately, with the advent of Google Sites and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, users are able to produce some flashy - if not kitschy - sites to help keep their friends and family updated with their latest activities.
However, many of these sites do require that you have some knowledge of CSS and HTML to produce a "cool" looking layout. Google is more functional than flair, but certainly easy to use. Facebook has its applications and tools - MySpace has its templates, but really...they lack a certain full-fledged slick look that is (arguably) "Web 2.0".
Got a mom that wants to set up a super cool website? Turn her onto SnapPages - a really easy-to-use website creation tool that turns a few drag-n-drops into slick websites, complete with calendars, photos and the ability to lock down sections, making them available to specified users.
Like a lot of new Web 2.0 applications, SnapPages is a Flash-based creation tool which makes building a website simple.
Creating a layout and modifying the overall look and feel of a site certainly is an easy task. Not only that, but the building tools runs very smooth and with little hesitation.
What's missing?
Well, currently, there's no blogging tool, which really is a deal-breaker for me, maybe mom won't be too concerned. But, with that being said, the site creator has mentioned that this is an upcoming feature in the works.
Also, many of the social networking sites out there allows you to include Flickr or Picasa pics, embed YouTube and other videos for your page...but not SnapPages. If SnapPages can address these as well (or open up a way to allow others to create plugins), then this would broaden its appeal greatly.
There are two packages available, free vs. premium. For $50 a year, you can have selection of a huge number of themes, unlimited pages, your own domain and 10Gb of space (and more). But, really - - for a majority of the web building neophytes, 1Gb of space and the predefined selection of themes would be perfectly adequate.
Also, someone made mention of the fact that the resultant website is Flash-based, and has issues with mobile devices that do not support Flash as of yet.
So, while this might not be the site generation tool for the techie crowd (yet), it is definitely capable enough for a good portion of the unitiated...and with the promise of new additions by the site developer, I can only see great things in store for SnapPages.
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