Blog: 
Nov
Oct
Sep
I Secretly Love Pagii
Aug
Unless you're about as Internet savvy as
Larry King,
you've heard of the the long wave of do-it-yourself website building kits and social networking sites.
I'm talking about MySpace and Facebook, or for the older set, venerated classics like Angelfire and
Geocities. Now the folks over at Freewebs have a new spinoff called Pagii (rhymes with cagey), and
I'm secretly in love with it.
Weird logo. Dumb name. Love must be blind.
How it Used To Be
Since about 1992, there's been two major approaches for creating a website. The respected, serious
web developer constructs their pages offline (angrily hand-coding in HTML or through the use of
a generator like FrontPage or Dreamweaver). The amateur might use an online page builder tool.
Unfortunately, the latter have always been limited by the capabilities of online forms. It's really
hard to create something as rich and dynamic as a website by answering a series of multiple choice
questions. That's why just about almost every online page builder looks something like this:
The Freewebs user interface for editing your page, circa late 2007.
Even from a single cropped screenshot, you can tell how much this stinks. You don't really have much
flexibility, and you're constantly waiting on form submissions to see your changes.
This might be fine for a wacky personal home page, but it's just not going to suffice for much anything else.
The Problem Explained
Why do online site builder tools mostly stink? Because anyone interested in building a website online doesn't
have the technical knowledge to do it offline. You must know quite a bit about site design and terminology
for these systems, and generally a knowledge of HTML helps significantly. Building sites on MySpace is so
annoying that there's a massive industry of secondary MySpace layout tools. It's just too difficult to do by hand, and
easy is exactly what this audience needs.
Enter Pagii
So what if you had an online page builder that was completely drag and drop---no form juggling required?
This is the principle behind the latest wave of tools, and Pagii seems to be the winner. The interface
is fast and impressive, albeit a little childish. Look at this screenshot. How can you not be in love?
Yes, in the browser. Drag and drop and point and click.
Of course this won't work for everyone. Pagii is too cutesy for professional types, even if the interface
is incredibly easy to use. The underlying code it generates isn't pretty either, and won't function
outside of a few select browsers and platforms. You need a pretty serious computer to handle
the massive JavaScript application that makes it possible. Pagii also doesn't support any interactivity
beyond a few canned tools. But nevertheless, this is a sample of the future of web design, whether we like
it or not.
Further Reading:
Would you like to leave a comment?
Read this.
###
