| If you haven't already, there may come a time when you want to create a presence on the Web. There are lots of ways to do this without having to buy expensive Web management software. I've examined and used several different Web services. In general, all the solutions have one of two problems, and sometimes both:
The easiest course of action is simply to create word processing documents in Google Docs or Zoho Writer and publish them on the Web. You can even do some fancy formatting to dress them up a little, but your options are limited. Everything is manual and managing a Web site of any complexity at all quickly becomes difficult. Google offered a better solution with Google Pages. It made formatting easy and allowed you to make a nice looking Web presence with a minimum of fuss. Unfortunately, it did little to make site management easier. It's a moot point, since Google is de-committing support in favor of their new service, Google Sites. More on that later. The current state of art is that you have to choose between easily creating a good looking Web site or easily managing a Web site that complies with someone else's format and presentation rules. For a good looking Web site, I'm a big fan of synthasite.com. They have many attractive customizable options, a very easy to use interface, and the ability to easily incorporate lots of fancy stuff. But if you try to make your site too complicated, site management can become an issue. The best easy solution to Web site management is a Web Wiki. Wiki's are designed to be collaborative and to impose a flexible but manageable structure for handling large volumes of information. Traditional Wikis use odd formatting rules such as camelBack linking and embedded linking syntax that only a geek could love. Modern Web Wikis may allow this, but these obscure techniques are deeply embedded or simply not allowed. Instead, these new services offer simple and intuitive ways to link your pages together. The best Web Wiki is Zoho Wiki. It has straightforward formatting, multi-author collaboration, page level access control, and embedded frames so that a Wiki can contain videos, soundclips, frames to other Web sites, etc. Zoho Wiki is super powerful and does a pretty good job at presentation. Unfortunately, Zoho severely limits the number of Wikis you can have. This is more than a trivial inconvenience. Consequently, I limit my Zoho Wiki to my private data and don't use it for publishing. The next best alternative is Google Sites, the replacement for Google Pages. Google doesn't claim it is a Wiki, but once you've used a Wiki, you know one when you see it. Google Sites allow many of the capabilities of Zoho Wiki and allows a seemingly unlimited number of sites. Access control is at the site level rather than the page level and embedding is limited to Google Docs. Although less powerful and flexible than Zoho Wiki, Google Sites can do almost anything you want and has no published restrictions on size or complexity. Google Sites even has a few unique goodies, such as neat linking to Google Docs spreadsheet forms. |