Getting non-IT people off my back!
Synthasite, a Web-based Web site creation and editing system
Web Applications Alert
By
Mark Gibbs
,
Network World
, 04/28/2008
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I have had endless discussions with all sorts of non-IT people about how to build their Web sites and it almost always ends
with them giving up. The problem is that there are so many parts to building even a basic site, and what most of them want
is the all singing, all dancing Web site with every advanced feature included and zero management overhead.
In the future I’m going to start pointing them to Synthasite, which while it can’t yet do everything, has some of the best features I’ve seen so far in a purely Web-based Web site creation
and editing system.
Synthasite is free and provides a choice of templates into which you can drop various widgets that range from the basics such
as text boxes, images, two column layout, and HTML fragments (which I will not be recommending to my non-IT friends) to Google
Adsense, forms from Form Assembly and Wufoo, photos from Smugmug and Flikr, and third party widget services such as Google
Gadgets, Slide, and Widgetbox.
While many of the widgets do require that you have more than just a clue, even a fairly unskilled user can create a good looking
and functional Web site just using the basics offered by Synthasite.
Synthasite provides overall site management as well as individual page creation and editing facilities including a method
for generating site navigation more or less automatically - Synthasite more or less holds your hand through every aspect of
creating a site.
What really impressed me is the integration of other services such as Form Assembly and Google Gadgets within the framework
provided by Synthasite - this means that Synthasite doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel and duplicate functionality that is
already offered by other companies. You could think of Synthasite in part as a very clever mashup service.
When you have completed your design you can publish it using a custom subdomain of synthasite.com, redirect the DNS entries
for an existing domain, or download your site in a ZIP archive to deploy on your own server (all you need is PHP support on
your Web server). The download includes absolutely everything you need for your creation to work, and can be a useful way
to prototype simple sites.
There are a few components missing at present most noticeably a Synthasite supported blogging feature. I checked the company’s
support to see whether anyone had come up with a solution, but it appears from the discussions that using an embedded external
blog service results in a snapshot of your blog rather than a view that dynamically updates (that said, I didn’t see any reference
to using an iFrame, which should ensure that the external blog is updated at the browser).
Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.
Comments (17)
SynthaSite Blog PlatformBy Anonymous on April 28, 2008, 1:27 amHi Mark Thanks for the great review and all the referrals! Just wanted to let you know that we are launching our own blog platform in Q3, and it will be tightly...
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iFram in SynthasiteBy Anonymous on April 28, 2008, 4:51 amHi Mark, I have got iFrames working in Synthasite by using the HTML widget
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Embedding a blog using SynthasiteBy Katie Pearse on April 28, 2008, 4:59 pmI also used a little bit of html code to embed my client's blog on his website. Check it out at: http://robertsonphotographs.com/Blog.php I use Synthasite for...
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SynthaSiteBy Anonymous on August 16, 2008, 3:56 pmI think Vinny Lingham did an excellent job coming up with this social media venture. Just wanted to add my two cents to it..:-) www.ShawnDrewry.com
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Websites created with synthasiteBy Anonymous on August 23, 2008, 1:35 pmThis website lists some examples of websites created with Synthasite. http://www.forsite.synthasite.com/
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interior decorationsBy Anonymous on September 1, 2008, 6:41 amI am looking for approval of my web site for publication.
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