These days scores of new internet tools are popping up to aid in increasing and diversifying your internet presence. I remember creating my first web site on Yahoo Geocities way back in middle school. Just like many sites created using the "free" service, it wasn't very impressive, but someone new to the world of the internet could put up a few photos, some links, and play with the font and colors. At the time this filled me with great amazement, and offered an open forum to post, of course, poorly conceived computer game strategies.
Then came HTML class in High School, and it was a whole new world. Now you could control, more or less, what went on the site. I immediately began work on my band website, the eerily named Darkdoctrine.org (no need to look, luckily it is long gone). It may not have been perfect, but it basically fit into the standard site format, was easy to navigate, and bug free.
Today's internet tools are a far cry from the original Geocities menu. They offer users who have never heard of HTML to publish their own sites, adding as much multimedia and features as their heart desires. But after using some of these tools, I have to say, I prefer HTML.
What exactly is the target of my ire? www.Synthasite.com
I attempted to use Synthasite to create a sort of "digital resume," with links to my work, website profiles, etc. Synthasite was intended to make website creation easy. Yet by presuming the user is an idiot, it has condescendingly given us very few tools to use. After hours of revisions I am ready to throw in the towel and go back to HTML.
First off when it comes to some of these "user friendly" tools, they are anything but, especially if you know even a little about making your own sites. You are forced to work with a limited amount of style templates made available by Synthasite. Making meaningful changes to these is next to impossible. You can add a banner to some of the style templates, but if you decide to change the style, the banner simply disappears. Want to use the same banner? Tough luck, you have to re-size it because every style has different specs. Some don't allow a banner, even if there is plenty of space for it.
Moving your images and "widgets" around is a frustrating task. Synthasite will give you the green light to move an image or widget to a certain location, but when you try to drop it down, nothing happens. Clicking "edit" or "delete" on certain widgets does nothing, and these features have to by edited by looking through a number of counter-intuitive menus.
Instead of being able to change all font and color settings like in Blogger, you must edit each text box individually when you decide to change settings. This means playing around with the font and colors is pretty much out of the question without a steep time investment. And what happens when you want to edit text in an HTML box, for example a link? No such luck, you still have to use old school HTML commands.
Speaking of the HTML widget, even this simple feature comes off as condescending. When you start typing an anchor link it will automatically double up your quotation marks, so you do not have to finish your url with a quotation mark, its already there. Why would someone who took the time to write in HTML commands forget to close their quotes? Yes it happens to the best of us, but rarely. More likely you will be typing along, and suddenly extra quotation marks flood your link and you spend even more time fixing it. This feature could prove useful if you were to spend countless hours coding on synthasite, but after creating your page is this even necessary? Especially since most programs don't use this feature, I have to ask, what's the point?
Synthasite isn't all bad. Anyone can go on there and pretty quickly make a presentable website. But for someone who wants more from this tool, you will be punished every step of the way. The more ambitious your site, the more you will find yourself pulling your hair, yelling "Why?!"
For those interested, you can see my work-in-progress here.
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