How To Create A Website In Minutes

Over the past week I’ve read a couple of posts having to do with building websites at an incredible pace (see Keith’s and Joe’s post. This is due in part to the experience some have accumulated like getting it down to a science. But credit can also be given to the advancements in technology. While we will always need programmers to do what they’ve always done, the doors continue to open for non-programmers making it easier to post some very nice sites. Seriously, if you can drag and drop, type some content, and can choose a template, you’re minutes away from developing your next website or sales letter.

Here are a few tools that can help you do that.

Blinkweb
I’ve heard of this one before, but after reading Keith’s post about it, it rekindled my interest. Sign-up is free and it allows you to quickly create pages for sales letters (like landing pages) or sites designed to contain content. You start out with giving your project a name, then you’re taken to an editor. On the left is your toolbox: layouts, widgets, and pages. On your right, the canvas you work on.

When you’re done, you have the option of giving it a subdomain to blinkweb.com (which is free). So if you have a site about “puppies”, you’d probably name it puppies.blinkweb.com. Or if you prefer, you can can purchase your own unique domain name via Blinkweb or even transfer one.

Blinkweb can host your site for free. If you have a host of your own, then you can download the site and upload it to your server. How cool is that?

Here’s a quick sample using some dummy text as filler (click the image to go there).

Wix
Are you ready for something even sexier? Wix is even cooler. It enables you to create flash-based websites in the same manner as I described above with Blinkweb. Wix has a lot of other things it offers, too, like the rotating images, importing from its own resource of royalty-free images or even using Flickr.

There’s a slight learning curve involved with this one, but don’t be intimidated as there are quite a lot of templates to start out with and get the feel for it all. Additionally, the interface is very intuitive. You can also publish to Wix.com or email your creation to your friends. Even create embed code like you would for YouTube videos.

I know search engines are getting better at indexing flash sites, but I’m not ready to make that jump. I’d much prefer to see this sort of thing used in the MMO niche as opposed to mile-long sales pages.

I made a simple little demo here (click the image to go there):

So what ideas come to mind? Do you see the potential in what these services can do for you?