Site Kreator: Painless and Professional Web Design for Less Blogs, Image Galleries, Forms, Forums, and More Lee Underwood
Creating a Web Site
The Web site creation process itself is pretty intuitive, but if you're not technically minded, there's a simple tutorial. Also included are interactive wizards and animated tutorials. Each part of the page is divided into blocks, which are easily accessible to create, add, or edit.
Some aspects of the page creation interface aren't overly intuitive. For example, it took us awhile to figure out that in order to make changes to a block, you use the "Properties" link rather than the "Edit" link. The "Edit" link is only for cutting, copying, deleting, and duplicating.
Adding a blog, discussion forum, image gallery, form, or mailing list, on the other hand, is as easy as point and click. You'll need to answer a few questions and then the system sets the feature up for you. It couldn't be much simpler. The blog is actually quite nice, rivaling any of the major blog sites. Many of the templates also include a Google search box.
The image gallery is quite nice. Thumbnails of the pictures are shown with enlarged versions displayed in a popup window. When you create an image gallery, you don't need to add each image separately. You can place them in a ZIP file and then upload them (the system provides an easy upload method), and the system will unzip it and place them on the page.
Since all of the technical aspects of the site — i.e., CSS and (X)HTML — takes place behind the scenes, you can focus on your business and what you need on the page. It's not, however, like a drag and drop application. You select where you want information on the page, select the editing icons you need, and proceed from there.
It didn't take long to create the site in our demo. (Remember, this has nothing to do with Web design/programming skills so we had no advantage there.) With a little bit of patience, a business can create a fantastic Web presence with little cost. You can also use you own domain name, which helps greatly with your online presence.
In addition, you can integrate many different e-commerce packages (such as PayPal), making it a great solution for an online store.
Conclusion
If you're looking to create a presence on the Web but don't want to spend a lot of money to pay a designer/developer (or don't have anyone in your office who is skilled at Web design), SiteKreator is an excellent alternative. Given a little bit of creativity and time, you can have a Web site that rivals many a professional site.
SiteKreator has a site development blog, along with a roadmap to help you stay current with the changes on the overall site. Several upgrades are planned, such as RSS feeds, the ability to upload custom CSS files, and options for using API-based search and uploading SEO-related files in the root folder of the site.
Now, you have no reason to stay off the information highway. Get building ...
