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Yahoo on Sunday launched a new publishing tool for subscribers of its web hosting service as part of its ongoing attempt to win over small businesses looking for an online presence.
[silicon.com...]
Shak
1. It's 15.4 megs and they do offer the app on CD.
2. Installation was a simple click, no registration.
3. Help box pops up immediately when you open the program and prompts you to get started.
4. It asks whether you want to start with a blank page or with a template. (I chose a template because I figured the templates would be scary).
5. Found put that there are no templates that come with the thing but you can click radio boxes and download from a pretty large selection.
6. I chose a "travel template", made a few changes and saved, (prompts you to save an index file first)
7. I created another page then clicked the nav to link to the page, (creates whatever.nav) You have to save at least two pages before you can create a nav.
8. Saved and then was prompted to publish.
9. The Yahoo info stated that in order to publish your site to the Web, you must be a Yahoo! Web Hosting Business Starter, Business Standard, or Business Professional customer.
10. I cut and pasted the code, rooted around through the default dir, found the sitebuilder dir and located the images dir and nav dir, uploaded everything, and bam, the 2-page site was live. No need for a Yahoo account but then again, I didn't expect there would be. ;)
11. Checked for validation. No doctype or charset so I added that.
12. Rechecked for validation, errors everywhere.
13. Viewed site in Opera 7x, no issues. IE6, no issues. Netscape 4.7, no issues.
The UI is intuitive for someone that's used editors before, lots of little boxes you have to doubleclick on to edit text and nav elements. Mucked around in the templates, they're a bit image heavy but not too cumbersome. Nothing too advanced, should provide people with the ability to churn out millions of cookie-cutter sites with relative ease.
I didn't try the publishing feature via Yahoo and I don't expect I'll set up a Yahoo account to try it.
The code is terrible but people downloading this aren't going to be looking at code, they're going to be playing with the templates, which are quite numerous. The pages I slapped up didn't look bad unless you viewed the source. ;) And... everything is layed out with tables.
Total time spent mucking with it: 10 minutes, mucho time saved by doing a find and replace to change paths to relative.
Trying to make the site accessible is a nightmare, may as well dump the code and start from scratch.
Another editor out there that can pump our sites using font tags and tables. Ahh, but it is so easy to use, and that's the scary part. ;)
