Fifteen or more years ago developing a website was a bit of a black art. It still can be.
Not so much the composing of the text and pictures because that can be done in Word. But its sending it to a website that can cause trouble, and take time.
But you’re already familiar with uploading to webpages through the likes of Facebook and eBay. Both take whatever you type into their sites and then place it as a live page on the Internet. We’re also familiar with uploading pictures to Kodak’s online gallery or videos to uTube of Vimeo. They make it fairly painless.
What if you want a complete site? Companies like Easily and BigDaddy sell your the domain name, the space to hold your site, the email accounts and even have templates for the appearance of the site. They have online tools where you fill in the titles, text, and images.
For sites of more than a dozen pages some context management software (CMS) is useful. There are lots of types, (Drupal, DotNetNuke, Joomla) and each needs a learning process, but for a slowly changing site they can be useful.
But increasingly we see the need to change sites far more rapidly, and without having to go through a logging-in process or getting back to a computer with the software installed.
So some quite large sites have turned to blogging software like WordPress. Blogs have to be quickly changed, and the site formatting needs to be automatic. You can either download a copy to use on your own site, or, better, simpler, and cheaper, sign up to a free site.
The software they offer takes some learning, but after a few hours of setting the colour schemes, the titles and so on, you will find that adding pages is blindingly simple. In fact its done by composing an email with pictures, and sending it to the site. Its loaded and viewable in seconds. And of course, where ever you happen to be in the world, its simple and cheap to send emails, Twitter messages and the like.
So updating a website from a phone is now quite practical. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Go to our site www.icip.co.uk and look in the News section to see the effect of adding a WordPress page into a normal website.
To see a medium sized website that seems to have been constructed entirely this way try www.panbo.com
