A little over a month ago I found myself in a position to help my brother (Dave) create and launch a website for his fledgling water aeration services company in South Florida. With an extensive background in software application and Web development (previous life) and several years on the product management side in the interactive/social marketing industry, I felt like I had plenty to offer in this area. The problem was that I had done next to zero Web programming in the past 3 years and the prospect of dredging up old IDEs, programming methodologies and tinkering with Web server logistics was not exactly compelling. The Web site “strategy” would be a piece of cake (theoretically) but the tactics of putting the site together would be cumbersome for this “old timer”. Facing this dilemma, I remembered seeing a recent Intuit commercial that touted their small-business Web site software. So, off I went to their site and discovered a pretty cool product called Sitebuilder. After signing up for a trial account, I got to playing around and realized that Sitebuilder aims to serve two segments:

  1. The non-technical small business owner looking to quickly and easily create/launch a functional, half-way decent looking yet obviously templated Web site. Intuit addresses this segment with a pure SaaS (Web) solution that allows the selection of templates, basic navigation, layout, controls, content manipulation and a way to easily publish. Pretty basic and simple stuff with a dead simple user interface.
  2. The fairly technical small business owner (or brother/father/friend/etc. of) that needs a platform to aid in creating a unique/customized website without having to sling HTML, Javascript and CSS (this is me). For this segment, Intuit offers a more powerful, desktop IDE application that allows the user to build a site from scratch (with the option of starting with templates) using various WYSIWYG drag and drop features and property editors as well as more advanced facilities to integrate features like forms, social widgets, multimedia and custom HTML/JS code.

Being that I fit pretty comfortably within the second segment, I ended up using Sitebuilder to develop my brother’s website and was pretty impressed with the results. Now, the resulting website is admittedly not the “crown jewel” of sites (www.aquasphereconsulting.com). But, considering that it only took me about 8 hours to put together a custom layout, decent design and populate the site with existing Aquasphere marketing content (not to mention, secure a new domain and publish live), it was well worth it to me. Plus, I was able to easily migrate the site to my brother’s permanent account and he can use Sitebuilder’s nice IDE to enhance and mantain the site going forward. I look at it as a good foundational site that can built upon over time as his company’s marketing needs evolve.

Here are some of the pros and cons of the tool based on my experience:

Things I liked (in no particular order):

  • Copy and paste across pages remembers the placement from the source page
  • Easy to use form control libraries and “on action” hooks
  • Nice image gallery widget
  • Nice page element alignment tools
  • Easy to adjust page layers (e.g., bring element to front/back, etc.)
  • Migration path from one site account to another (this came in handy because I essentially created the site on my trial account and needed to transfer it to my brother’s account)
  • Ability to use WYSIWYG to place/define custom HTML snippets (I used this to integrate the 3rd party “AddThis” social sharing widget on the site)
  • Easy of securing Web domain, hosting, publishing and business email addresses (NOTE: The Web domain is yours and can be transferred to a different service provider in the future if desired)

Things that need work:

  • Getting vertical spacing between elements consistent across browsers was irritating.
  • Table layout isn’t supported (this currently makes the home page look like s*#t on a mobile browser and there are small layout differences across desktop browsers)
  • No ability (that I could find) to create global elements that applied to every page (e.g., same appearance and placement for stuff like hero banners, global navigation, footers, etc.)
  • Proprietary format for page files that doesn’t lend itself nicely to exporting to zip and deploying on a different Web server (wonder what the migration path is if you no longer want to use Intuit for hosting…I’ve yet to explore that scenario)
  • Social plug-in tools could be much richer. For instance, they could offer a social sharing widget that allows visitors to easily share the site via various social media channels. I had to embed my own (AddThis) social sharing widget using Sitebuilder’s custom HTML/JS code embed facility.

Something I probably don’t have to mention (but will anyways) is that this tool is not targeted to the web design/development purist that likes complete control, frowns upon WYSIWYG and has the time/inclination to develop a site using traditional IDEs, debug, hosting and design tools. If this is you, you’ll be disappointed by this product simply because it doesn’t try to compete with the pure Web development IDEs. I used to be this guy but as I’ve transitioned away from a software development career and my responsibilities/obligations outside of work have changed (e.g., family obligations), I don’t have the extra time and sharp Web development skills that I used to have. So, if you’re like me and need to get a decent small business Web site up and running quickly with some reasonable abilities to customize, you should definitely try this product out.

How about you, have you tried this product or one like it? I’d love to hear your story.

Bookmark and Share
Advertisement