I was just hanging out at Twitter the other day (@groby) when I stumbled upon a tweet of Micki Krimmel‘s where she was talking about code-free content management solutions. (BTW: Micki is also playing for the L.A. Derby Dolls. Talk about all-round talent!)
Since I’m always working on one website or another, trying out new ideas, this is something that interests me very much – coding the 17th website is just not that exciting. One of her recommendations was Squarespace.
I’m simply blown away. It’s a very easy point & click way to build web sites (including blogs, discussion areas, photo galleries, what-have-you) that really doesn’t require any code. It comes complete with pre-built traffic measuring tools, log viewing, etc – and pretty, too.
And in case you really need your own custom tweaks, you have full access to the CSS, and limited places where you can even inject additional HTML.
Since I’m currently tinkering around with re-building my wife’s jewelry web site, I gave it about two minutes, just playing around – here‘s what I got so far.
It’s impressive enough that I’ll spend some serious effort on this over the coming days. (Add to that the fact that they’re fairly affordable – $8 a month is certainly in line with other hosting solutions, and they do all the software patching for you )
Oh, and if you’re – like me – paranoid about your data, they have full XML export facilities. And blogs can be exported in Moveable Type format, which pretty much every other blog software can import.