Websites for the masses

Website design has always been a difficult thing for me in Brazil. For several reasons. The main reason until now, is that most of the brazillian customers are not willing to spend a “bigger” amount of money to develop a CMS and the coding behind a dinamic website, that will cost 2.000 to 10.000 Reais ( 1.000 to 5.000 US$ ). This happens for a reason. In Brazil, thigs does not work as in US, that the web presence of a company is responsible for a good share of the companies income.

Brazillian professionals are known for their skills to get a good technology and make it cheaper, without loosing a lot of it’s quality. So the idea is:  Not all of our clients need a fully customized website, with a revolutionary layout and navigation methods. In fact, most of them just need an almost standard website, easy to use/update. Most of my clients, would be more than happy to know that I can offer a cheap option, semi-standard website, for less than half the price they would pay for a custom website.

For this kind of option, we can’t afford to pay coders, so the option is to use some free CMS, like blog tools ( wordpress, for example ) or more complex tools, like SquareSpace.com. They developed a powerfull tool to create websites, based on templates. The great thing about SquareSpace, is that their templates are very customizable, and they have a good amount of templates at your disposal.

For the hardcore user that knows a bit of coding, you can access the CSS to have control over it directly, or you can control the CSS and some (X)HTML funcions through a graohic interface.

Their interface to create websites, is complex, but doesn’t get even close to the complexity of codes. An advanced PC user can create his own website with a bit os knowledge of Photoshop and how sites work.

It is a paid service. A very affordable paid service.

Thank God most of my clients aren’t advanced PC users.

If you know other great tools to create websites please put them in the comments section.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 7:41 pm. It is filed under Design Thinking, Freelancers, Tech, Web Design and tagged with coding, design, html, online tools, squarespace, webdesign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.