BP2 Weebly

WEB 2.0


Contrary to popular wisdom, (read marketing hype) web 1.0 was just as interactive as web 2.0. The millions of pages that appeared on the web in just a few years were almost all put up by ordinary folks wanting to share their passions. Sites like Tribe and Salon were all highly interactive, and even before the web existed, online tools like usenet and bulletin boards were all about two-way, interactive communication.


Asked this about web 2.0: "a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?"
Here's how Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web and the director of W3C replied: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0." IBM developerWorks Interviews. Podcast recorded 7-28-2006. Retrieved Sept. 7 2011, from transcript at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206.txt
 

The real change in web 2.0, was that it became cool for more than the early-adopter nerds among us. When most Americans began to use big, well-funded, well-designed and easy to navigate (and profitable) sites like Facebook and blogger, web 2.0 was declared.

Don't get me wrong, I am so glad that a more broad-based and balanced demographic is now online rather that the angry, horny, teenaged geek boys who dominated so much of the earlier web. So I am especially interested in other ways more people can make a wider variety of more comprehensive and complex sites beyond wordpress themes and facebook posts.


 I decided to try out weebly. I was able to get from this, which is what you get as soon as you log in, to this in just a few minutes

What my students, who are all aspiring filmmakers need, beyond building up their production chops, is to start to build a brand, to be able to market their new found skills and network with other filmmakers. Most of them use Facebook, many make posts to IMDB and throw their videos up on youtube or vimeo, but they really should start trying to have a personal and professional presence in cyberspace, i.e. their own website. I've been encouraging the use of Blogs and wikis, but these do not really have a professional feel, they are a bit too much web 2.0, if you will. They need to look more like real production companies who hire real website designers to make them real websites. That's not gonna happen yet, so I'm looking at these sorts of easy template tools, that hopefully will allow them to make custom sites without having to master Dreaweaver and CSS.

I played some with weebly as above but was not that impressed with their design sophistication and so went back and checked out some other tools, finally settling on Wix

 

Here is the attractive and very simple page you get once you sign up. I clicked create and was directed to their templates.

This is there little two minute tutorial. It looks like the site has developed a bit since this was made as it doesn't work exactly how it is described.

  

They offer about 350 templates that are very highly customizable, and what looks like fairly cheap design help and add-ons. For this simulation of a student filmmaker site, I am going to use only free tools.        

 

I picked this one and made up a fake site for the "Kinolicious Filmdog Collective." The depth and complexity of the editing tools is really impressive. There are all sorts of gallery and e-commerce pages as part of the templates, and with very simple edits you can get a really functional and attractive site very quickly. But Template websites, things like iWeb and the Weebly site above, often really look like templates and and tend to scream amateur. But it looks like with Wix one could customize a site so extensively that it ll the templates traces could disappear. Granted it ill not have the same idiosyncratic functionality that comes with a custom site, but as long as it doesn't look exactly like all the other template sites (such a curse with things like Word resume templates and frankly, with most blogs )

Here is the address to the live site:  KINOLICIOUS

 

I've mostly steered my students to wikis for quick websites, but for this branding, marketing approach, Wix is by far the best easy web solution I've seen. Their hosting and design charges also seem reasonable, which is important because another aspect of a professional site is that it needs to have its own URL, something they offer for about $5 per month. On the other hand, I pay $4.50 per month to host my personal sites, which gives me enough bandwidth and storage that I am also able to host all the file downloads I offer my students from my class wetpaint wiki which has limited attachments. I have thought it would be wise for anyone who has the design chops and resources, to design their own sites from scratch, but with tools as good as this, I am starting to wonder about that. I plan to introduce Wix to some of my more ambitious students and see what they come up with.    

These are all the sites that Total Choice Hosting hosts for my $4.50/month. If you shop around, the web is really an amazing bargain.   
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