Websites your grandma can develop? Maybe.

Building websites with SnapPages.com

For the last six months, my hair stylist has been talking about creating a website for his salon. He didn't want to spend thousands of dollars but he wanted something that looks really nice. There have got to be thousands of low-cost build-it-yourself tools out there but most of them aren't easy for a novice to use, particularly if the newbie wants to make use of any sophisticated web tools supported. Then I heard about a website creation tool that claims it is simple enough for anyone's grandma to use and still creates a beautiful website: SnapPages.com. 

After using SnapPages.com, I can say that it's not quite as simple to use as they claim. But Paul and I sat down together at Starbucks one Wednesday morning and within about 30 minutes, had a lot of his site configured.

Today, every businesses needs a website, even a small local business like Partners Hair Studio in Potomac, MD. The salon has a few reviews on the web in Yelp and InsiderPages, but co-owner Paul wasn't even aware of that until I pointed it out. Let's just say that Paul is not exactly tech-savvy. SnapPages.com, which has available since 2007 and has been used to build thousands of sites, it says, showcases a number of visually stunning sites that used the tool. So if it was as easy as promised, both Paul (and me as the friend that offered to help him) would be happy. SnapPages offers reasonable prices - free for a personal account with some limitations or $8/month or $80/year for a "pro" account with a lot more features.

The tool has really elegant image editing tools, including a flash-based image rotator. Another really important feature is that the templates have design best practices embedded.  For example, within a template or theme, the fonts and colors are defaulted out of the box so you know they work well together. In addition, while it was a little frustrating at times, you can't arbitrarily position the elements where ever you want - the theme and template ensure that they are spaced in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The New Website Setup Guide, which you get after you sign up, has a lot of helpful design hints. For example, the Setup Guide suggests that if you want an iPad or iPhone-friendly site, you shouldn't use the Flash-based elements like the slick image rotator. Unfortunately, the guide does very little to help "Grandma" step through how to actually use the tool.  Most product documentation does exactly the opposite - tells you how to use each feature, but not why you should use it and what might be a good use. 

The SnapPages Setup Guide does much better on delivering best practices but could definitely use a lot more plain instructions because not all of the features are immediately intuitive. For example, when you add a block of text or another widget to your page, the editing tools are in the lower left hand corner of your screen. It took me a few e-mail exchanges with Director of Community Kim Friesz before I realized that some of the features I thought were missing (like centering an image in an image block) were there - I just didn't see them!

So I have to say after reviewing the tool, that its definitely not simply enough for most Grandmas I know. However, it isn't hard for the reasonably technically savvy person. Even so, there are a few features missing that would make the tool even better and more appropriate for more types of websites:

• First, you can upload images to your heart's content but not documents. They are supposed to have a file sharing system some time later this month but for now, if you were a business that wanted to publish a .pdf of your price list or whitepapers and other documents, you'd have to host the documents someplace else and link to them from your site.
• Second, there is no way to add a table to your web page. I couldn't get the price schedule for Paul's services to line up using any of the existing content blocks so I had to use the Code Box widget to add an HTML snippet with a table that I configured myself. This wasn't too difficult with my limited knowledge of HTML, but Grandma isn't going to find this very user-friendly.
• Third, there is no "undo" capability. If you add an element and want to delete it, you can delete the entire element, but if you want to "undo" the changes you made within an element, you can't. For that reason, you need to remember to save your work a lot when you are using the tool (something they recommend in the Setup Guide).
• Finally, there is currently no way to add a search capability to your site. This is probably OK for the simple site I created for Paul, but it's definitely something that the more complex sites in the showcase could use and one that I would want for my own website.

To see the site that I've been working on for Partners Hair Studio, check out http://partnershairstudio.com.  For another example of a site built on SnapPages, my colleague Sandy Geisler created a really nice site for her company, Learning and Performance Solutions, using SnapPages as well. Sandy shared the following feedback with me: "I do think the templates they provide are nice options. For what they charge this is a solid product that I would recommend to others who want a website but don't want to spend the time and $$ putting a fancy one together. This group seems to have the primary functions that most users would want. If they would add just a few more functions, they would move from a "really good" site to "quite great" (for most users)."

I can definitely recommend SnapPages for image-heavy web sites because the image manipulation capabilities and built-in themes are really stunning. It's also great for websites with text, though not yet for those wanting to publish a library of documents hosted directly on the site.

As for finding a website creation tool that's really easy enough for Grandma to use? I'm still on the hunt for that.

• Microsoft
• SnapPages
• website development tools