Create your website!

Introduction

This week, the class learned about how to create websites using free builders and hosts such as Wix and Weebly. Of course, these are only two of hundreds of sites and services that offer free (and / or cheap) website design and hosting services. If you're interested in finding a good match for what you have in mind, I suggest what our teacher did: having us actually trying the different services and see which felt better.

Weebly

Of the two options, I chose to play around with Weebly first and make a quick site as a fan of Lucas Arts, a game company.
When first using the drag-and-drop style of website building and design, it can take some getting used to: seeing how the template and design responds to the elements you put in. But if you haven't learned to build a website by writing HTML or CSS, this is a much easier and accessible form of getting your content onto the internet how you would like it.

The above screenshot is to illustrate the toolbar and dashboard of Weebly, which frames the content I was building for a Lucas Arts fansite. 

Both the left toolbar and top dashboard-bar give you lots of options for control of your design and content; and it handles all the HTML and CSS for you! You also have a lot of options from themes and designs to choose from (or can import your own), as seen below.

I haven't had much experience with Weebly except for the tinkering this week, so I don't completely know the ins-and-outs, or little oddities and bugs that others have found. I know there is definitely the issue of a balance between too-much control of the drag-and-drop and too-little control for the users, but Weebly seems to have balanced the two fairly well.

Wix

[ Coming Soon: Group Website ]