An awesome free web builder: Yola

On the web, free things can suck badly. They can be outdated. They may contain malware, may not be at all useful until you shell out $49.95 for the full version, may not even work.

Since 1999 I've dealt with a lot of horrible free things. I think the worst was GeoCities, at the time. You couldn't post commercial links, the text overlapped in these awful draggable text squares, and you had about as much flexibility as a frozen Arctic explorer. Aside from my ex-girlfriend, it was the biggest, most non-productive time sink of my life.

Around the time I left a human-shaped exit hole in Geocities, drag-and-drop builders were just drags. You had to sacrifice any sort of professional aspirations. If you could put up pretty graphics, you couldn't add metatags. If you could add metatags, you couldn't use Javascript or PHP. Use a special language, and you couldn't post links or affiliate ads.

So when I ran into Synthasite, the culmination of years and years of people rejecting crappy free web builders, I was in heaven.

Synthasite provided everything: any content I wanted to put up, in any basic format. Video, photo galleries, file downloads for visitors. They even encouraged me to put AdSense ads on my site that paid me, and now they offer GenBook Appointments! Whether they used some tricky Javascript to serve their own ads part of the time, I don't know, but I made some decent coin off a few basic sites for the 5 minutes of work I put in.

And the flexibility of the content options is finally matched by the interface's ease of use. Just follow your options down the menus till you get something you planned to put in, and you're golden. I have never had any hassle from Synthasite, as it was known, from signing in to publishing the site.

The only real problem I had with SS was the long domain names. Blablabla.synthasite.com. Try mentioning that at a busy party where you have three seconds to get your site across and the sibilant S's are all but lost. In the fight? Plinth and bite? Never mind.

So after a few months away from this web builder, I was pleasantly surprised by Sythasite's new name: Yola. Vaguely exotic, like that Yola girl down the street I never asked out. Still not too viral a name, but a lot shorter and a good step for an otherwise excellent free web building tool.

Upsides: If you know how to mash buttons till you get something pretty, that's what Yola is all about. Add your own content, especially with Cooltext, and you can have a site that fits your needs. If you're in a hurry, I can't think of anything that works faster and more efficiently: I made this site in about an hour: The Catered Event

Downsides: Now that the venture capitalists are demanding their returns on Yola, the site nags you every time you publish, on a level with grandmotherly and mid-life crisis guilt. Still, unless you're a total freeloader, you won't mind getting a .com for $15 a year. Considering the ridiculous prices I've paid elsewhere for a company that dropped 90210411.com into an Internet no-man's-land, that's very sweet. Skip a couple big loads of laundry over the year and you're a webpreneur.

Also, a few of the templates are obvious freebies from elsewhere. But you still have a ton of templates to choose from, and best of all you can switch themes after you start putting content in.

The bottom line: Unless you're a CSS-huffing freak that needs every image, font and page element done to pixel perfection, I think you'll love Yola. "You'll Love Yola". Hm, wondering if I can get any royalties....

Come back soon to learn how to get 30 days of an awesome PHP/CSS/JS/HTML/XHTML builder absolutely free -- with NO payment information needed -- and learn why I bought it!

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