Zooloo consists of the following components that you can use to design your own portal website for free:

• zSocial: Social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with single status update across all networks
• Dashboard: Personalized dashboard for news, photos, events, email, etc.
• Site Creator: Website and blog builder with themes and widgets
• Privacy Manager: Control who sees which parts of your website
• Photos/Videos: Online photo organizer and video library
• Calendar: Calendar, address book, reminders and to-do lists
• Entertainment & Shopping: Customized online entertainment for music, movies, etc. and favorite shopping sites

Homepage with Social Networking

The homepage has a search box at the top, zStatus and zSocial on the main page, and widgets on the right to upload photos, access email, calendar and your blog.

zStatus is a status update box from where you can update your status across Zooloo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Below that is zSocial, where you can interact with these social networks. Clicking the tab each network shows relevant sub-headings: for example, Facebook lets you choose between News Feed, Status Updates, Photos, Wall & Friends.

You can choose the background of your home page from several themes.

Your Dashboard

You pick and choose widgets to create your personalized dashboard. The dashboard is organized with tabs at the top, so you can create multiple tabs for different areas of interest. Clicking Add Widgets opens up a gallery of widgets that you can drag and drop to any tab on your dashboard. Widgets that need access to your login or profile need to be customized from the Options button on that widget.

The widget gallery is quite impressive – some of the popular types include:

• Social Tools – Email, Social Networks, Photo-sharing, etc.
• News Feeds – CNN, New York Times, etc.
• Entertainment – Last.fm, iTunes Media

You can see the list of widgets available in Zooloo here. From within your dashboard, you can listen to podcasts and watch videos without leaving your site. You can rearrange widgets with drag and drop and customize the theme. Your dashboard is private, so nobody else sees it at any time.

Build Your Zooloo Website

With a free Zooloo account, you get a yourname.zooloo.com website for free. Your website includes profile, photo, video, graffiti, blog, and three custom pages. With a $30 annual subscription for Zooloo Plus, you can use it with your own domain name and some extras.

The zCreator website builder is very easy to use. You can choose from different layouts and themes for your website. You add content placeholders by drag and drop and fill them with the text and images to build your website.

Each page of your website is private by default. You can choose to share individual pages, photo albums, and videos publicly, or with specific friends on Zooloo. The privacy settings are easy to use and offer granular control over who sees what on your website.

Blogging and Graffiti

Zooloo also offers a simple interface to add a blog to your website. The blogging service supports categories, comments, and photos/videos. You can also import your blog from Blogger.

Graffiti is Zooloo’s social bookmarking or clipping service. Using a bookmarklet from any browser, you can quickly clip a link, photo, or video on your Graffiti page. Graffiti posts also have comments so you can comment on your friends Graffiti items.

More About Zooloo

Zooloo is an easy-to-use, attractive option for non-geeks to have their own website and a central place for social networking and infotainment. The owners of the site say that they are not competing with established social networks like Facebook, but complementing them. There are already over 20,000 users of Zooloo from each state in the US and 76 countries. Users are buying from within their shopping malls inside Zooloo using PayPal. There are plans for an iPhone application as well.

Will you try out Zooloo or recommend it to someone? Do you prefer any other free website/dashboard service? Let us know in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (26)
• How to Create Free Websites Instantly to Share Information Fast (14)
• How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding (59)
• Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda (9)
• Create A Website For Free with No Annoying Ads (22)

You can easily create free websites instantly in order to share content with the world. Here are some web applications that will allow you to share files and emails, create anonymous web pages and annotate links you share.

Note that all the applications presented here are registration-free and only require one or two mouse clicks to get going. Another advantage is that they save the time of opening attached files or reading text offsite. After you set them up you can easily share them via Twitter, email, Facebook and so on.

Transform an email into a webpage

Moomeo is a nifty little web service that transforms an email into a public webpage. Just forward any email to post@moomeo.com and within a minute you’ll get back a link you to a webpage you can share.

The webpage contains exactly the email you sent, with the attachments displayed in a sidebar, along with some sharing options (Twitter, Facebook and more). At the bottom of the page people can comment. See a screenshot below or visit a live example.

Go ahead and try it right away! Send an email to post@moomeo.com.

File to webpage

file2.ws is a great tool for sharing files by using them to create free websites instantly. It can handle numerous kinds of files, including images, audio, documents, programming source code, web documents, and archive.

To set up a file based webpage, click ‘Choose file‘, browser for a file on your computer (up to 15 MB), and click ‘Start conversion‘.

Once uploading is done, you’ll see a link to the webpage. People with whom you share it will be able to see the file without downloading or opening it. If they do wish to save the file to their computer – there is a direct link at the bottom of the page.

Here is an example of an Excel file I’ve shared.

Start from scratch

Several services will let you create a standalone webpage from scratch. Copytaste, Dinkypage, and Pastehtml will all do the work, each with its own special features. The services vary in the ability to comment,  adding or not adding advertisements and so on. All work within a single click and allow you to edit the HTML or just write plain text.

Annotate any webpage

Pagetweet is designed to let you annotate webpages before you share them. You can add a 140-character comment at the top of any webpage.

After you enter the page’s URL and add the comment, you’ll get a link to the exact same page, with the comment at the top of it. People who visit this link will see the webpage along with your comment. If they forward it – other people will see your comments as well, so it is better than just sharing a link via Twitter or email.

See below how an annotated webpage looks like. Visit the actual page here.

Do you know other cool ways to share content online? Share it with us in the comments!

Image Credit : Immagina

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (26)
• How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding (59)
• Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo (19)
• Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda (9)
• Create A Website For Free with No Annoying Ads (22)

DevHub is the site I’m talking about. So I went to check it out and make my own revenue generating site. I was very skeptical that any sort of website making application could turn out anything that looked and ran decent at all. For years I worked with various content management systems like Red Dot, Joomla, WordPress and Spectra. All of them required some degree of programming to make a decent web site.

Here’s how you can make your website.

First, go to DevHub and begin the sign up process. It’s a very easy thing to do. Just look on the homepage for the very obvious button.

From there, it asks you for some typical sign-up information: first name, last name, e-mail address. Nothing too intrusive. Again, very easy. At this point you can choose your own sub-domain or let DevHub know that you are going to use your own domain. I went the subdomain route, because although I love my dear readers, I’m not buying a domain name just for a demonstration.

As you can see, the site has a very distinct Web 2.0 feel. Typically I don’t care for that sort of design, but it works extremely well, when the application functions simply and smoothly.

This is where the money making begins. On this page, you can choose what kind of revenue generating modules you’d like to include in your website. I decided to use all of them, for testing purposes.

So there you go, some of it is affiliate revenue, and some of it is pay-per-click (PPC) type advertising. I’m guessing that DevHub sets up these relationships and then takes a slice of whatever your page makes and passes the rest on to you. Sounds like a decent business model to me. I just wish I had thought of, and executed, the idea as well as DevHub did.

Next, you pick out the physical layout of the site. One column with header, two columns with header and so on. each layout has it’s own strengths and weakness, so try to think about how you want your content laid out before doing this step. There’s no need to overthink it though, because you’ll see that changing the layout is also brilliantly easy.

Then you can choose your colour scheme. DevHub has really simplified the process by making most of their colour schemes simple and limited. By doing so, the site will always look good and take the burden of designing off of you.

Now that that’s done, you’ll be asked to read and agree to the end user license. It seemed pretty straightforward to me, even though it’s a bunch of legalese. You should read it for yourself  and if you have any questions, talk to a legal professional. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the web.

On to the final editing of your cash cow site. DevHub presents you with a mock-up of how the page will look, but with some AJAX elements to help you tweak it more.

You can change the number of columns. There are only three choices, but really anything more than three columns is just cluttered looking and will lose you readers.

You can drag and drop elements on the page to reposition them. The green shows you where the element will land if you drop it right now.

You can tweak what the module will show. In the Search Keyword field you can add more than one word. I just went with one, for efficiency. In the City or State field, I don’t know if non-North American cities or states show up. Give it a shot, I’m pretty sure they would. This helps you REALLY target your advertising to your specific audience, increasing your chances to make a few bucks.

You can add MORE modules or widgets. Be careful with this! Some people think that if they pepper their site with enough ads, they’ll get clicked more often. Not so. What will happen is your site will die, penniless and alone.

And, finally, the part that really matters, you can add or edit content without knowing a thing about HTML or any programming language. The Content Module has most of the editing features you might find in a word processing program.

Once you’ve got all that set up, you can preview your site to see just what it would look like. Not tooo shabby, eh?

Of course, it would look better if there were some real content in there. However, I think this illustrates pretty well the ability of DevHub to help you build a website that is monetized, looks decent and is free! That’s the trifecta right there, folks.

Naturally, this all begs the question. How much can you make with a DevHub website? Well, I don’t really know. That’s pretty much up to your ability to market the site and drive visitors to it. Then, hopefully, they like what they see and click on a few links and maybe buy some affiliate products. Yes, you could probably make more if you set up your own affiliate and PPC relationships on your own website, but how many of us can make a decent website on our own?

Let’s say you only make about a hundred bucks a month from your site. That’s fairly high for a new site, but it can be done. It’s not that much is it? However DevHub allows you to set up 10 different sites for free. So, if you can get each site to generate about a hundred bucks, that makes for a thousand dollars a month! Not enough to quit your day job or retire, but maybe it helps pay off the house a little quicker or helps you save up for a down payment.

Keep in mind the entire process from start to finish took me less than ten minutes. Instant web presence and not a dime out of pocket. There you have it folks! Don’t thank me, thank DevHub.

Do you have any experience using DevHub? Are there other apps out there like this (or better) that give you free website and lets you monetize it? How’s your monetizing process been going? Drop us a line below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (26)
• How to Create Free Websites Instantly to Share Information Fast (14)
• Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo (19)
• Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda (9)
• Create A Website For Free with No Annoying Ads (22)

Many people are put off by this because HTML is a mystery and the prospect of ‘designing’ sends shivers down their spines. However, designing a cool website that is useful and pleasing to the eye need not be such as hard task.

BlueVoda is a free website builder, so easy to use that anyone who has enough computing skills to make a FaceBook page and use MS Paint, can use it for creating your own website for free. All it is, is resizing boxes, entering text, choosing colors and putting in some pictures and fancy buttons – simple stuff.

First, you’ll obviously have to get the software. It’s 100% free and is available for download right here. When you go to this page you will be asked for your name and e-mail. Once you have entered in all of this information about yourself you can begin the download by checking your e-mail and following the link provided.

An activation key will be e-mailed to you, which you will need to use the software. When the download has finished open the program for the first time. You will be prompted to enter in the activation key that BlueVoda e-mailed to you. Once you have done this the program should start up and ask you whether you want to open an existing or new page. Click ‘new’.

Along the top and down the left hand side you’ll see tons of icons which can be daunting at first. It’s best to break these up to better understand them.

On top, we have all of our basic web editing tools. Text entry, insert image, change font, create buttons and PayPal links (such as Donate, Buy etc).  All of these are resizable and can be placed anywhere on the page.

So for example if I click the text entry icon a small box will appear on the page. I can move this around by clicking and holding on it and moving the mouse. I can resize it by dragging one of the blue boxes around its edge just as you would in MS Paint, right? This technique can be applied to every feature you put on the page be it a picture, game, button, video or banner.

Down along the left hand side you’ll see the more flashy stuff such as Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Flash Player, your RSS feed button and advertisement banners. Place one of them on the page and resize as needed. Then, to put content in it (eg. a video) double click the box and press the ’Browse’ button to locate the file on your PC.

So you know exactly how big all of these features are going to be, there are two measurement scales along the side with moving markers in sync with your mouse. To get a real feel for how things will look later, you can preview your site in your browser. Simply click ‘File’ and then ‘Preview in Browser’. This will launch your default browser with your site displayed as it would be on the web.

Chances are your site will have more than one page and to make it easier to edit and cross-check, you can have multiple tabs open at once. You can also create a basic page with only the headings and menu bar to use as a template for every page of the website. To do this, create the basic look of the site and click ‘File‘. Then click ‘Save as Template‘.

To change the basic properties of your page, right click on the background and click ‘Page Properties’. From here a window will open with tabs such as ‘Background’ and ‘Scroll Bars’. You can change colors, add a picture as the background and make fancy scroll bars and page transitions.

The options and features in this program are all really well laid out. When you have finished your website, there are two things you have to do to get it live on the net.

• Go to your webhost and upload all the images, videos and other files you used without changing their file name (this is important otherwise the site won’t know how to find them).
• Then, click ‘View’ in BlueVoda and select ‘Page HTML’. When the HTML code is up on your screen, copy all of it and then paste it into your host’s HTML editor. This page will now be online.

Repeat this process for all the pages of the website.

TIP: For the best compatibility with BlueVoda you can use VodaHost (this is where they make their money), but it works just as well with free hosting companies such as FreeWebs so long as you choose the ‘Advanced’ website editor (this will allow you to upload the HTML).

The site below took me ten minutes to build:

Imagine what you could do in a few hours or days.

Wendy has also covered 2 other services for creating your own website for free, or maybe a disposable webpage is your thing?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Create A Website For Free with No Annoying Ads (22)
• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (26)
• How to Create Free Websites Instantly to Share Information Fast (14)
• How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding (59)
• Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo (19)

Finally, I gave up web design and development when quality of content started to get pushed to the side by quantity of content. Flash sites, lots of images, pop-ups, pop-unders, sliders, etc. Trust your quality content and you don’t need this fluff. Trust your content and you can make your website blazingly fast.

With a website that is hosted on a free service, faster is definitely better. Why? Because ‘free’ tends to attract a lot of people and the server has to dish out your page plus thousands of other peoples’ pages that aren’t optimized. It’s like trying to pass a convoy of Kenworths pullin’ logs with your Jimmy haulin’ hogs. But if you have a small Porsche, that gets a lot easier to do.

Here are some tips to trim the fat, in no particular order.

1. Use Tables Sparingly

Tables are a catch-22. In the beginning, they were used to lay out design as well as put content into table format. As the design layouts got more complex, the tables got bigger and nested deeper, and that always means a slow down on load time.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came along and really helped the problem of using tables for layout. Unfortunately, the browser makers couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of standards – and still can’t. What looked great in CSS in Firefox looked like a dog’s breakfast in IE and possibly didn’t even render in Safari. Don’t get me started on IE5 on a Mac. I’m still in therapy over that.

Please only use tables to layout content that must be in a tabular format – like a price list or hockey stats. That reduces the number of tables, and depth of nesting, which means speedier load times. Learning CSS will make a big difference, if you must have a fancy layout.

2. Use HTML to Create Colour

Yep, I’m Canadian, so it is colour with a ‘u’ to me. I know HTML is America-centric so the attribute is ‘color’. Learn your hexidecimal color codes and use them to to liven up content instead of images.

Try adding the color attribute to your HTML elements to spice it up. This works especially well in tables, or the body tag, like such:

<body bgcolor=”#FF00FF”>

If you were a browser, would you be faster at loading a simple 7 characters of #FF00FF or a 10×10 pixel image of the colour fuschia a few thousand times? That’s a rhetorical question, you in the back row. Put your hand down.

3. Link To Scripts/Style Sheets

If you use a certain JavaScript (JS) or CSS repeatedly throughout your website, think about creating their own file and calling it, instead of putting it on every page. Since a browser tends to cache a file and call that file first before checking with the server, your browser will already have that script or CSS ready to use. That means less HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) calls which means a faster loading page.

How to Call an External JavaScript:

<!–
<SCRIPT SRC=”my_script.js”>
</SCRIPT>
–>

Why did I put those comment tags around the call for the JavaScript? Because not every browser is set to read scripts. Adding the comment tags makes the browsers with scripting disabled just skip over it, instead of giving annoying error messages.

How to Call an External Cascading Style Sheet:

<link href=”my_style_sheet.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>

It’s that simple. The attribute href is where you set the location of your style sheet. The rest of the attributes tell the browser what that file is, so it knows what to do with it.

Some developers may use the @import method to call a stylesheet. In Internet Explorer, this is like having your <link> tag at the bottom of your file, causing it to load the whole page and THEN render the styles on it. Not good.

4. Combine Your Commonly Used Scripts in One File

Many web developers will use the same scripts over and over again. Perhaps there’s a clock script and a calendar script and maybe some sort of special effect script that they’ll use on every page. Instead of having 3 separate files, with 3 separate HTTP calls, put the scripts in one file and call it once. That cuts your HTTP calls by 66% and it gets cached as well. You speed demon, you! Before you raise your hand again, yes, you can do the same thing with CSS files.

5. Do Not Use HTML to Change the Size of Your Images

If you want to use an image that is 1000×1000 pixels on your web page, but you want it to be only 250×250 pixels, change it in an image editor. Some people will ’shrink’ the image using HTML like such:

<img src=”BigPicture.jpg” height=”250″ width=”250″>

If that 1000×1000 pixel image is 2 MB in file size, resizing it with HTML doesn’t make the file size any smaller! In fact it may take longer to load, because now the browser has to put 10 pounds of poop in a 2 pound bag, so to speak. Not an easy task.

Hopefully these tips will help you. Give me a shoutback in the comments if you use them or have some other HTML optimizing ideas to share.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers (28)
• Selected 25 CSS Applications and Tools (19)
• How To Install Firebug on IE, Safari, Chrome & Opera (22)
• “TEST EVERYTHING”… 100+ ‘Website Check’ Tools in-one! (3)
• Write & Develop HTML Offline with First Page (12)

Why You Might Need to Create Free Websites Instantly

For my own personal websites and blogs, the extent to which I usually “save time” only involves starting out with a few free CSS templates and then customizing them, only because I’m too lazy and too short on time to start from scratch. However, I’ve also resorted to using these free “instant website” services for very specific purposes. James touched on a version of this in his article on how to create a disposable webpage and Wendy covered a couple of these tools in her article on how to create a website for free without ads. They are especially useful for Internet marketing, but also for the following uses:

• Simple one-page promotional sites for a product or service
• A simple Internet page for your online resume
• A one page article on a current controversial topic, allowing visitors to respond with their own opinions
• A one page tribute to a lost loved one
• A perfect solution for someone with zero web design skills

If you do choose to use the following free services, keep in mind that there’s one major downside. The ease with which they provide sites also leads to an entire plethora of absolutely ugly, horrendous, MySpace-like web pages that should never, ever be published on the Internet. Now, with that said, if you know what you’re doing – you can create some pretty cool websites with the following tools.

BlinkWeb – Create Free Websites in the Blink of an Eye

BlinkWeb is one of those rare sites that offers something for free without any gimmicks or loopholes. The website that you end up with doesn’t have any major drawback other than the fact that your site is a subdomain of BlinkWeb. In other words, a free site called VB Programming would be addressed as vbprogramming.blinkweb.com. The design interface is very well written, and a lot like many of the major web design applications out there, you can select the item from the left menu and drag it into your page, as shown below.

The site builder offers 100 templates to choose from, and a small mix of widgets like a guestbook, Earth maps and Google ads. When you first join, you can choose whether you want your site to be formatted like a sales newsletter, a content page or a blog. While it can take a little bit of creativity, it’s certainly possible to create a pretty decent web page with BlinkWeb, such as the dieting website below.

If you want to create free websites instantly and quickly, I would rate BlinkWeb at least as one of the top two or three sites to get the job done with very little hassle.

Squidoo – Even Better Than Free, You Get Paid

Squidoo is one of the most popular web page creation services that’s taking “instant websites” to a whole new level. Squidoo is sort of the “Associated Content” of website design, in that each site you build is a lot like an article, and it’s also a part of the larger Squidoo social network. Squidoo calls each page a “lens,” and each lens essentially consists of various elements that you’ve chosen to put together into a single page. Those elements include modules of text or images, CafePress module, Ebay module, Amazon module and many others.

The potential to create some very cool content with Squidoo is very good. Laying out the pages aren’t rocket science, and the interface is about as easy as a web design can possibly get. You just click on the modules you want to edit, or you delete the ones you don’t. When you’re finished, click “Publish” and you’re page is finished.

It’s important to note a few things about your Squidoo web page. First, you don’t even get a subdomain, you get a directory on Squidoo.com. Your page shows up much like articles do on many free article sites, with the title at the end of the Squidoo domain. So, remember to title your Squidoo page to show up well on Google search.

WetPaint – When You Want to Know What Other People Think

Like Squidoo, WetPaint is a very cool community that seeks to provide wiki-like websites where the entire community can edit your page, but no one needs to know any programming language. Once you create your page, if you configure it so that the public can edit it, the page is immediately live even while you’re editing. There are some cool features like the ability to upload photos or add video – but the real power behind this free service is that you can essentially create a collaborative community page where everyone can provide input. Have a controversial topic and want to see what the community thinks? Create a page on the issue and provide the ability for visitors to argue each side of the debate.

The only ads that show up are unobtrusive Google ads, as shown above, but you can edit your left navigation bar with new pages so it’s highly customizable. A great example site that I found is the “HP Community Wiki” shown below.

As you can see, these pages aren’t drab or boring, and they also don’t quite have the same old-fashioned “wiki” look as many other wiki coded sites do. Creating your own web page to sell a product or to publish content is one thing, but creating a “living document” on the web that’s constantly changing as the community sees fit is very exciting. WetPaint is one of the first sites that successfully combines the wiki community style with free website design.

Weebly – The Best Free Instant Website, Hands Down

In my own humble opinion, Weebly is the best service to create free websites instantly. Why? Well, Weebly isn’t just free, it’s ad free and it offers more tools and features than the other sites. The interface on Weebly also offers drag-and-drop, but there are more items to choose from such as the basic toos like text and images, multimedia content like a photo gallery or embedded YouTube player, a variety of revenue generating widgets and useful miscellaneous features such as forms, a feed reader and even a simple forum.

You can choose from about sixty to seventy templates, but even having a clean template doesn’t prevent people from making some pretty horrendous websites – there are lots of examples if you search Google for “weebly.com.” However, there are also some examples of some very clean, simple websites that would take less than an hour to put together without any knowledge of HTML, FTP or any other form of web programming.

You get a free subdomain like “yoursite.weebly.com” and there aren’t any annoying ads of any type. Weebly is supported by the domains that they sell to customers who decide they want their own.

Have you ever used a free webpage creator, and were you pleased with the result? Share your own opinion in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• The Best Freeware To Do An Easy Wordpress Auto Install (20)
• iWeb – Build A Quick, Easy & Beautiful Website [Mac only] (31)
• How to Create Free Websites Instantly to Share Information Fast (14)
• How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding (59)
• Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo (19)

Disposable services are incredibly useful when you just want a bit of anonymity online. Can’t trust a website that looks a little dodgy with your real email? Use a fake one which you can gain access to later.

Disposable services are also good for cases where you just need something to exist for a limited amount of time and not reside in cyberspace forever, for example files you want to share with your friend, or in this case – a webpage which expires after a certain timeframe. Below, I’ll show you how to create a disposable webpage in a matter of seconds.

Why would you want a disposable webpage?

The aptly named service is called DisposableWebPage and is completely free. What it does is that it creates an instant wiki for you to edit, share and perhaps collaborate with your friends. This also means you reap all the benefits of a wiki system with rich text editing and collaboration built directly into the system – plus you have version control so you can easily revert back to previous forms if something goes wrong.

These web pages can last up to 90 days or less, and can be very useful for event based discussions, for example, party or travel decisions – where it’s important to get everyone’s input but you don’t need to have the details stuck online after the event.

With this service, you don’t have to worry if all your friends use Facebook, Friendster, or whatever social networking service to organize and plan an event. Everything is on a single web page, accessible by all.

You can also put in photos, and even easily integrate sticky notes, and maps to make the page more dynamic.

Finally, you don’t have to worry about the site expiring without your knowledge. Every time you visit the page, a countdown timer to expiry is prominently displayed.

How to set up your own disposable page

What I really liked about it is that it’s pretty much quick and dirty. You don’t need to register in order to create a page, so your disposable web page can be set up in just a matter of clicks. To show you how easy it is, I’m going to walk you through making one for yourself.

Step 1: Go to DisposableWebPage, and click on the big red link, and name your page

Step 2: Your page is created! Now you can bookmark it right away, start editing it, change the timer, or send editor keys to your friends so they can edit this page as well.

Step 3: After you make the changes you want, send it to your friends so they can collaborate as well.

That’s all there is to it! Simple, and flexible for quick and dirty solutions where you need a web page which expires after a certain amount of time.

Do you use disposable tools? If so, tell us which ones you use in the comments!

Photo Credit : Wok

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• How to Install a Wiki on your Website (17)
• Create Your Own Wiki Site Easily With WetPaint (7)
• ZIM – A Desktop Wiki / Note Taking App [Linux, Windows] (14)
• Wrike – Project Collaboration Tool (11)
• Work With Others Online Without Tearing Out Your Hair (8)

It is designed for webmasters who would like to have a greeting card site of their own without having to write the programs to create one. After you register, they will send you one line of HTML code to insert on your website and you’re all set to go.

Having an ecard site can give your website more traffic that will help you generate extra income. You will have total control over it all and in fact, the average user will see it as a complete ecard program managed by you.  You can personalize the site by using your own images, midifiles, quotations and background.

You can see detailed statistics of your page usage including your daily card creation, daily visitors to your ecard site, your rank in the 123 Greetings system and lots more. They will also email you the log files.

Here are the 4 easy steps to setup your own E-greeting card website:

1. Create an account by visiting the 123 Greetings Associates website.
2. Insert the HTML tag into your website.
3. Customize your e-mail text.
4. Customize your card page.

With your free 123 Greetings site you can:

• Offer your visitors more than 20,000 online greeting cards
• Customize your greeting cards site with your own logo, background colors and text
• Add your own images, midi files and quotations
• Earn revenue through your e-card site
• View your detailed statistics online to track your site’s performance

Here is an example of a landing page you might create. This page would be linked to your 123 Greetings card site. You can create any type of page on your existing site you like to match your existing design and then just link to your 123 Greeting card main page.

A visitor would pick greeting cards from many categories. Here is an example of some of the cards in the Birthday category.

Greeting cards can either be flash or static. Here is an example of a Flash greeting card. It has a button so the recipient can turn the music on and off. This is a non-working sample.

The visitor to your 123 Greetings website would fill out this form to send the card. This is a non-working sample form.

Don’t have a website?

Check out this MakeUseOf article to learn how to create a free website with no annoying ads.

Do you run an e-card site like this? If so, what are your experiences with it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 5 HTML Tips to Create a Fast Loading Free Website (33)
• Write & Develop HTML Offline with First Page (12)
• Wordpress.tv – The Best Wordpress Tutorials Ever! (9)
• Wordpress Exploit Scanner Helps Administrators Scan Their Database For Malicious Files (10)
• Web Metrics 101 – What DO all these Terms Mean? (17)

Setting up and maintaining a website can be a pain because you often need to have basic knowledge of HTML, PHP, Javascript, Flash, CSS, or Photoshop. It can also be costly to run a website if you buy a domain name and have monthly hosting bills. This is okay if you are planning on maintaining a website for business or for a long-term project but why pay when you can get it for free?

It used to be that the only option for creating a free website was using a service that placed annoying ads at the top of every page and gave you limited design options. And to get a really good website you had to pay a designer and spend a lot for hosting. Today we have more free web design options and here are a couple you should check out.

Synthasite

Synthasite allows you to create a website for free and there will be no annoying ads popping up on your site either. The website templates are so cool and professional with Synthasite that you could easily create a business website using their service. They have live examples from current users who have created business websites for free. You must be at least 18 years of age to use the Synthasite Toolset.

Synthasite offers a quick and easy Website Builder that requires NO technical skills or knowledge of HTML. Synthasite lets you create a website or a blog and it super simple to use. It offers drag and drop features which makes it even easier to use. I was able to easily change templates, color schemes, delete and add features within seconds.

The Synthasite setup allows you to drag items from a scrolled list that appears on the right of the screen. Drag to the left to position an item on the page. Click once on the item to edit it and a menu appears on the right of the screen again.

Weebly

Weebly allows you to create a free website or a free blog layout. With Weebly you add content elements such as videos, pictures, maps, and text to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to a webpage you created. Click on an item and a sub-toolbar area at the top with options for that item.

Just like Synasite you are given quite a lot of professional looking templates to choose from and they make it easy to change your design by using the icon toolbar at the top of the page. You can also add a photo gallery, files, videos, audio and forms to your website with the simple click and drag features.

A standard free Weebly account is allowed 2 websites per account. There is a file size of 5 MB on the free account and there is a “create a free website with Weebly” link placed on the bottom of each free account.

If you have your own graphics you can upload those as well to create an even more customized look for your blog or website.

Features of both services:

• 100% FREE with no hidden fees
• There are no ads and no banners popping up
• You can customize your website layout and make your site unique
• You get a free subdomain or free hosting for your own custom domain
• There is nothing to download
• It works right from your browser
• Free tutorials, FAQs, and help

I tested both Synthasite and Weebly and setting up an account was quick and easy and only took a few minutes. The interface was easy to understand and there was a lot of help available when I got stuck.

Using a blank page template in Synthasite or Weebly is like opening a new document in a word processing program. Once you create a page you can add content by simply dragging and dropping a text box into the area of the screen you want it to show up on.

Have you found other good free website applications that make creating a website easy?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Creating Your Own Website For Free with BlueVoda (9)
• Create Beautiful Web Pages In A Snap With SnapPages (8)
• Write & Develop HTML Offline with First Page (12)
• Using CSS to Create Document Templates (6)
• Top 4 Web Tools to Create Free Websites Instantly (26)