Need the loo AND need to build a website? There's an app for that Geocities saviour Jimdo has launched an iOS app, allowing instant fanboi-friendly website creation for those moments when inspiration strikes and a Facebook post just isn't enough. Want to set up a new website, but can't be bothered to boot up a computer – let alone learn HTML? Jimdo will fix that with a WYSIWYG iOS app which …
"In these days of social media it seems slightly archaic for small organisations to have a dedicated web presence at all"
If a company tries to get me to visit their Facebook page rather than their own website, they don't get a visit from me!
Regards,
A grumpy not-that-old-yet man!
"In these days of social media it seems slightly archaic for small organisations to have a dedicated web presence at all"
Archaic but sensible. I keep my work on my own Web site, under a domain name which I own, on hosting space which I manage to scrap the cash to pay for, and which people can reach easily without fighting their way through Zuckerberg's bullshit -- and I friggin' like it that way.
Just because everybody's doing it, that doesn't make it a smart move. As my Mom was fond of asking me, "if Billy and Kevin jumped off a cliff, would you do it?"
"If a company tries to get me to visit their Facebook page rather than their own website, they don't get a visit from me!"
Big ups to you, man. Y'know what even bugs the hell out of me more is when they want you to go to their friggin' Farcebook page and "like" them, usually as a precondition of their viewing and considering your resume, or some shit.
WordPress being the hackalicious CMS that it is, I would shy away from it. Especially as most "sites" done in it look more like blogs than actual sites, which also detracts from the professionalism involved into making said site.
Interestingly, someone I know actually built a Jimdo site, and it looks pretty nice for a cheap site thingy. Definitely more professional than the standard Geocities site.
Templates? Free? My hand-coded website costs less than £80 per year including my domain name, which is less than the price of a half pint of beer a week. And try using PHP and MySQL with them! I used Dreamweaver a few years ago. Bad move. Ever tried to debug Dreamweaver generated code? And as for antisocial fb & Twitter? Rant over!!!
For the small but growing number of us that do not use Facebook or have a Facebook account, a website (no matter how humble) is a nice gesture.
Indeed, websites may come back into their own again - the mean average age of Facebook users is now well over forty and rising. Why? Because the younger teens just don't want to know: see comments on the uncoolness of Facebook at http://mashable.com/2013/08/11/teens-facebook/.
Learning basic HTML skills ain't that hard, and once you understand the way it works it's much easier to handcode and get a predictable result, than to try to get past all the weird formatting quirks in online editors.
Or, you could use a 'Web builder' which supposedly makes this process simple, but actually takes longer to learn your way around than HTML, and is far more restrictive.
Or you could take the CMS approach of uploading 100MB of vulnerability-riddled php and SQL code, just to display a one kilobyte page.
Then, have to update to an new CMS version because of critical vulns in the old one, and (big surprise) find that the updated CMS is incompatible with content from the previous one, so it's start again from scratch time. Six months later, repeat process. Ad nauseam.
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