Get your site at Gandi!
By Ryan on Thursday 18 December 2008, 09:29 - Gandi - Permalink
No, we're not referring to healing the blind, although with our new online website creation tool, Gandi SiteMaker, you are indeed able to work with accessibility features to help the visually impaired... 
Gandi SiteMaker is a product that has been developed by our English subsidiary, Moonfruit, since 2005. It is certainly the most impressive web 2.0 application that I have ever used, and this in an atmosphere where everything these days is being called web 2.0. It is really for this very reason that we asked them to join us at the time.
I can hear you saying right now, "...there’s already a boatload of WYSIWYG website creation applications out there”! And you could not be more right. Except that is has now been 9 years since they began the project, which has not stopped improving since then… And yet, I am not one who is really destined to appreciate this type of simple tool! I'm “Old School”, an old HTML tagger that still tries to optimize my gifs to be just the right hues… But to help Gandi, I have gone with Gandi SiteMaker, in order to see what it can do and experience its strengths and weaknesses.
What we are offering today, is an application with a extremely wide range of possibilities that will let you create a website of amazing quality in the blink of en eye! Dozens of templates are available to you as a basis for your site and for inspiration, while those of you who are graphic designers will find themselves a type of QuarkXPress of the web (yes – I did mention that I was old school…).
Now just hold on there (because I can hear the skeptics snickering in the background, thinking that I am going to launch into a sales pitch). I am not selling anything here! It’s free! Yes, that’s right: for those of you that have a domain name at Gandi, you can now create a website without any technical experience necessary. There are so many features that we had to create a lengthy FAQ just to cover all the questions of the product.
Features? Excluding the possibility of creating a website from an existing template (or a blank page for those of you that prefer it, of course), you may choose pre-established structure to help you along, and finally, with one click, you will find your website ready to be published or modified!
I recommend that you have a quick look at this video, which is no longer than 3 minutes long, and will show you just how easy it all is:
Now it’s your turn!
Wouldn’t it be nice to make a website for your parents of photos of your newborn? With one click on “insert”, then on “object”, I select “Pop-up Gallery”, and voilà! I now have a photo gallery, for which the most difficult part was to choose the order of my photos.
Have you been wanting to create a website for your local sailing club? Nothing could be more simple: a video player to show clips of the year’s bloopers, a web page where you can add a forum in just a single click, and a subscription form where you can manage the rights of members of your forum.
Aspiring artist, are you tired of non-lucrative expositions, and do you dream of having your own website with a gallery, an order form and an online payment system, so that you can sell your works all around the world? Once again, only a few clicks are needed to build your own website, and you do not need to know any computer language!
Hey! Let’s add a guestbook, ah…now that really is nice for visitors. Perfect!
Do you have a domain name at Gandi? Congratulations! You also have a Gandi SiteMaker Free Pack that you can already activate in your account, and begin to see this wonderful tool for your self – a tool that will truly let you create your online presence in no time at all!
Professional and customized
We have limited the Free pack to 2 pages, because we feel that this is enough to make a presentation page (a welcome page and a personal résumé for example) and in order to let you try out SiteMaker whenever you want. This is not a limited-time offer, it is a given for you.
Our two fee-based backs are for those of you that are more convinced that this is the tool for you, and who greater needs – still within an affordable price range. See for yourself: our Starter Pack, at €4 euros (excl. VAT) per month, allows you to create 50 pages, and to store up to 500 MB of files, and to benefit from all the advanced modules (with the exception of e-commerce). This latter feature is available with the Professional Pack, which costs €8 (excl. VAT) per month, with an unlimited number of pages and having 2GB of disk space. You can refer to our pack comparison page for more details.
Many of you have been requesting a service between free hosting and our Gandi AI virtual dedicated servers. With Gandi SiteMaker, we now hope to meet this demand, since the hosting of your websites is included in all the packs!
I can hear you saying right now, "...there’s already a boatload of WYSIWYG website creation applications out there”! And you could not be more right. Except that is has now been 9 years since they began the project, which has not stopped improving since then… And yet, I am not one who is really destined to appreciate this type of simple tool! I'm “Old School”, an old HTML tagger that still tries to optimize my gifs to be just the right hues… But to help Gandi, I have gone with Gandi SiteMaker, in order to see what it can do and experience its strengths and weaknesses.
What we are offering today, is an application with a extremely wide range of possibilities that will let you create a website of amazing quality in the blink of en eye! Dozens of templates are available to you as a basis for your site and for inspiration, while those of you who are graphic designers will find themselves a type of QuarkXPress of the web (yes – I did mention that I was old school…).
Now just hold on there (because I can hear the skeptics snickering in the background, thinking that I am going to launch into a sales pitch). I am not selling anything here! It’s free! Yes, that’s right: for those of you that have a domain name at Gandi, you can now create a website without any technical experience necessary. There are so many features that we had to create a lengthy FAQ just to cover all the questions of the product.
Features? Excluding the possibility of creating a website from an existing template (or a blank page for those of you that prefer it, of course), you may choose pre-established structure to help you along, and finally, with one click, you will find your website ready to be published or modified!
I recommend that you have a quick look at this video, which is no longer than 3 minutes long, and will show you just how easy it all is:
Now it’s your turn!
Wouldn’t it be nice to make a website for your parents of photos of your newborn? With one click on “insert”, then on “object”, I select “Pop-up Gallery”, and voilà! I now have a photo gallery, for which the most difficult part was to choose the order of my photos.
Have you been wanting to create a website for your local sailing club? Nothing could be more simple: a video player to show clips of the year’s bloopers, a web page where you can add a forum in just a single click, and a subscription form where you can manage the rights of members of your forum.
Aspiring artist, are you tired of non-lucrative expositions, and do you dream of having your own website with a gallery, an order form and an online payment system, so that you can sell your works all around the world? Once again, only a few clicks are needed to build your own website, and you do not need to know any computer language!
Hey! Let’s add a guestbook, ah…now that really is nice for visitors. Perfect!
Do you have a domain name at Gandi? Congratulations! You also have a Gandi SiteMaker Free Pack that you can already activate in your account, and begin to see this wonderful tool for your self – a tool that will truly let you create your online presence in no time at all!
Professional and customized
We have limited the Free pack to 2 pages, because we feel that this is enough to make a presentation page (a welcome page and a personal résumé for example) and in order to let you try out SiteMaker whenever you want. This is not a limited-time offer, it is a given for you.
Our two fee-based backs are for those of you that are more convinced that this is the tool for you, and who greater needs – still within an affordable price range. See for yourself: our Starter Pack, at €4 euros (excl. VAT) per month, allows you to create 50 pages, and to store up to 500 MB of files, and to benefit from all the advanced modules (with the exception of e-commerce). This latter feature is available with the Professional Pack, which costs €8 (excl. VAT) per month, with an unlimited number of pages and having 2GB of disk space. You can refer to our pack comparison page for more details.
Many of you have been requesting a service between free hosting and our Gandi AI virtual dedicated servers. With Gandi SiteMaker, we now hope to meet this demand, since the hosting of your websites is included in all the packs!
Comments
Wonderful....
I will try this new feature shortly....
Keep up the good work Gandi.....
From the linked site:
``Our sites are based entirely on Macromedia's Flash technology''
and
``You can't upload HTML for use in your site.''
I am really surprised that Gandi are promoting such a tool that ignores all web standards. I expect better from an ethical and considerate company such as this.
Hi El Bunto,
It's true that the editor is in Flash, as this allows unparalleled easy of use for the site builder, please have a go to see what I mean. But for the output, the site is generated in both Flash and HTML.
SiteMaker sites use progressive enhancement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progre...) to produce the viewable site, so we start with a W3C compliant clean XHTML version and then upgrade this to the full Flash version if we detect Flash and Javascript. The HTML version contains all the same content as the Flash version, and is designed to be clean and easy to view/navigate. It has no 'tables' in it ;-), and uses a standard format to it is easy to understand.
The full Flash version is the best way to view the site, as it contains all the 'rich' media, but the HTML alternative is there for those that cannot see this. If you use a screenreader with Flash turned off, it will read the HTML version correctly. So you are right you cannot add HTML directly, but anything you add to your site is then rendered in the HTML and marked up correctly. So for users who don't know how to write HTML this is a better solution.
Standards are an extremely important part of making the web accessible to everyone, which is why our tools outputs in this way. The reality is that web professionals can create wonderful standard compliant sites, though these can sometimes be out of reach for non-professional users, or those just learning.
The SiteMaker tool is certainly aimed at these non-professional users or those building for the first time on the web. So we make sure that the sites that are produced by it are standard compliant and gracefully upgrade (rather than downgrade) if the viewer has the appropriate technology.
But the key for these non-professional users is to make a tool that is easy to use and not as frightening as handcoding HTML.
You are quite right that there are many bad tools out there, but ours is not one of them.
Having said that, there is always room for improvement. We've been working on this product for 10 years and we've still got more to do. I hope you will appreciate our efforts.
Joe
@Joe: Your post hinges on one unfortunate assumption: that Flash provides an "upgrade" to HTML.
Furthermore, what the tool itself uses and what output it produces need not have any connection. An easy to use site creator tool could still produce sane HTML rather than Flash. You certainly don't need Flash for "rich media"; at most, the Flash should represent a fallback for modern browser technologies. For isntance, you could embed a video with the video tag and fall back to Flash for browsers that don't support that tag.
At this point, HTML can do absolutely everything Flash can, and often better.
Hi Anonymous (if that is your real name ;-),
I didn't mean to suggest that Flash was an upgrade to HTML in general, but more specifically that this was how it was handled with SiteMaker, e.g. for SiteMaker the Flash version is the full fat version, though the HTML alternative does have all the content present, just not presented with as much style.
SiteMaker started development 10 years ago when HTML wasn't capable of all the things Flash was, and browser compatibility wasn't what it is today. It is true that HTML has come a very long way since then and as you say can do all the things Flash can do, and sometimes more. In fact it is our objective to add more and more direct HTML features and improve further the HTML output so that ultimately the user could decide which version is their 'primary'. But this is still some way off.
The important part of my point was that regardless of which version is 'better' both are presented so that all content can be seen by all potential visitors, which I believe was the concern that El Bruno was raising.
Anyway, thanks for your input and we'll let you know as and when we produce new features. Take care,
Joe