SynthaSite For Creating Professionally Looking Websites Easily

It is always a pleasure to review really innovative new Web 2.0 services so I am rather pleased to introduce our readers to newly launched SynthaSite, an AJAX based Web Publishing Platform that was launched yesterday in what they call Technology Review stage. Basically this South Africa startup is intended to provide you with tools to create a professionally looking website focusing specifically on widgets and mashups. SynthaSite is completely browser-based (in my experience it works with Firefox slightly better than with Internet Explorer) but at the same time it really looks like desktop software.

SynthaSite currently offers a little under one thousand of free accounts for the Tech Preview (aka Alpha) release. The problem is any content you create is highly likely to be lost when next versions are released. So it looks like this version is intended mostly for bloggers and media and not for general public. And it is understandable: building buzz and getting feedback during the very early stages of a project seems to be vital for web 2.0 companies (at least it is much more important than getting as many users as possible on day one and having your servers crashed under the unexpected load). The beta release is scheduled for the fourth quarter so there's plenty of time to voice your opinion and provide feedback so that you could influence what features will be prioritized in the upcoming release.

I have registered with SynthaSite to see for myself if they have the chance "to become the standard for web publishing" (here I am quoting SynthaSite CEO, Vinny Lingham). The concept is to allow users to create and publish websites using existing blocks (such as mashups and widgets) instead of developing everything from scratch. It means that creating a really good-looking and full-feature website won't need knowledge of HTML and will only need some sense for beauty and the ability to drag and drop (I'm sure we all already know that by now).

So after giving SynthaSite a short test I can definitely say that this application is really easy to use and rather intuitive. To create a website you simply need to name it and start building pages for it (there are a few templates but of course they are rather basic and are intended for testing and review purposes, not for serious business users). You will see all the usual zones in the pages and will be able to add content simply by dragging it from the menu on the right. After adding a content block you can edit and configure it so that it is actually what you want to have on your website.

Sure, it is visible that this is only the testing version: it only has a small number of the most used blocks (such as Flickr and YouTube for media and only ‘Digg it!' for buttons). But the way it works with this currently available content is really smooth and thus we can expect that the future versions will bring more content and, thus, more freedom to users.

What I like about SynthaSite is that they made the project's roadmap public and it really is impressive. I would not want to go into details of what features they promise to add in the future because the list is really long but anyway I will mention the most impressive pending features, such as collaborative site building (shared page editing, sharing templates and components with the community), service marketplace (copywriting, components and templates development), site analytics and monitoring, publishing, deployment and hosting. Sure, most of the advanced upcoming features will not be free but at the same time the service has the potential of creating a marketplace for all kinds of web development specialists and will give an income opportunity for all of them. I will definitely be looking forward to the next release and especially to the community features SynthaSite will provide.