A guide to building websites in the Cloud
Dreamweaver costs hundreds of pounds, but building in Wix,
SquareSpace or one of the other many cloud-based HTML WYSIWYG editors
out there is a much more affordable option – prices begin at free and
head up towards the $20 mark at a push. So why isn’t everyone doing it?
Here’s our guide to getting started.
It may not surprise you to discover that most companies who offer WYSIWYG HTML editing in the cloud also offer their own cloud hosting plans, too. Cloud hosting is a necessary component to allow users to access your website over the world wide web – it is the process of storing your website’s coded information on their servers, so other people can look at it. In fact, with many of them, signing up to a hosting plan through the HTML editor itself will result in automatic subscription to a hosting plan through the provider. Though many of them – such as SquareSpace – offer a way to tie-in a domain name from a different hosting provider, some of the providers are ‘us-only’.
With this in mind, you have to pick your editor carefully as you’re going to be tied in to their ecosystem. Companies like Wix do not offer you direct control over your HTML and CSS, whereas companies like WordPress and SquareSpace make it a selling point to do so. Even with access to the source code, though, it can be tough going – SquareSpace and Wix use their own special variants of HTML and CSS to code ‘templates’. If you’re used to starting from scratch in Dreamweaver, there’s a lot to learn.
Once you’ve picked your editor, you’ll be offered a series of templates, or ‘themes’ (WordPress). These are a great start point for your website design, and offer a jump-start in to the coding. Try to select a template with an overall feature set that you like, rather than focussing on aesthetic details. Most templates – especially WordPress ‘premium’ themes – allow you to edit appearance values manually, post-selection, but few of them allow you to make significant adjustments to the layout without first diving in to the code.
Once you have selected your template, get to grips with your editor. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll be using a CMS (Content Management System)-based editor, which will allow you to make adjustments to, and add and subtract, a few components. If you want to dive deeper, you’ll have to consider making a ‘child theme’, which is similar to forking a repo on GitHub. If you don’t know what that means, you probably won’t want to do it.
If you’re using a more liberal editor, such as SquareSpace, you’ll be confronted by a whole host of options to change the tiniest detail on your webpage. And, if that’s not enough, SquareSpace also offers CSS editing directly in the editor. The big deal about all of these cloud-based website builders is that they allow for immediate representation of your changes on-screen, without doing the little ‘save…preview in browser…reload page’ dance you have to do with desktop editors. So feel free to play around with the default functionality in the editor of your choice, safe in the knowledge that you can put it back to where it was before with little turmoil.
What, then, about Wix? Wix is one of those halfway houses. Hosting is free, but you can’t really play with your code. At worst, it’s a good place to go build a site, then use the Inspect Element function in Chrome to nab some of the better-looking CSS. At best, it’s a quick and dirty way of getting something functional up and running as soon as possible. Just don’t expect massive customization options.
So, there’s an overview of what it’s like to build websites in the Cloud. The main thing to take away is this: don’t anticipate huge amounts of control. And, if you do want control, prepare to get intimate with some tricky code. Finally, before committing to a single provider, have a look at what Adobe are working on with Edge Code – it could be that they have created the perfect halfway house between Cloud editor and Desktop IDE.
It may not surprise you to discover that most companies who offer WYSIWYG HTML editing in the cloud also offer their own cloud hosting plans, too. Cloud hosting is a necessary component to allow users to access your website over the world wide web – it is the process of storing your website’s coded information on their servers, so other people can look at it. In fact, with many of them, signing up to a hosting plan through the HTML editor itself will result in automatic subscription to a hosting plan through the provider. Though many of them – such as SquareSpace – offer a way to tie-in a domain name from a different hosting provider, some of the providers are ‘us-only’.
With this in mind, you have to pick your editor carefully as you’re going to be tied in to their ecosystem. Companies like Wix do not offer you direct control over your HTML and CSS, whereas companies like WordPress and SquareSpace make it a selling point to do so. Even with access to the source code, though, it can be tough going – SquareSpace and Wix use their own special variants of HTML and CSS to code ‘templates’. If you’re used to starting from scratch in Dreamweaver, there’s a lot to learn.
Once you’ve picked your editor, you’ll be offered a series of templates, or ‘themes’ (WordPress). These are a great start point for your website design, and offer a jump-start in to the coding. Try to select a template with an overall feature set that you like, rather than focussing on aesthetic details. Most templates – especially WordPress ‘premium’ themes – allow you to edit appearance values manually, post-selection, but few of them allow you to make significant adjustments to the layout without first diving in to the code.
Once you have selected your template, get to grips with your editor. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll be using a CMS (Content Management System)-based editor, which will allow you to make adjustments to, and add and subtract, a few components. If you want to dive deeper, you’ll have to consider making a ‘child theme’, which is similar to forking a repo on GitHub. If you don’t know what that means, you probably won’t want to do it.
If you’re using a more liberal editor, such as SquareSpace, you’ll be confronted by a whole host of options to change the tiniest detail on your webpage. And, if that’s not enough, SquareSpace also offers CSS editing directly in the editor. The big deal about all of these cloud-based website builders is that they allow for immediate representation of your changes on-screen, without doing the little ‘save…preview in browser…reload page’ dance you have to do with desktop editors. So feel free to play around with the default functionality in the editor of your choice, safe in the knowledge that you can put it back to where it was before with little turmoil.
What, then, about Wix? Wix is one of those halfway houses. Hosting is free, but you can’t really play with your code. At worst, it’s a good place to go build a site, then use the Inspect Element function in Chrome to nab some of the better-looking CSS. At best, it’s a quick and dirty way of getting something functional up and running as soon as possible. Just don’t expect massive customization options.
So, there’s an overview of what it’s like to build websites in the Cloud. The main thing to take away is this: don’t anticipate huge amounts of control. And, if you do want control, prepare to get intimate with some tricky code. Finally, before committing to a single provider, have a look at what Adobe are working on with Edge Code – it could be that they have created the perfect halfway house between Cloud editor and Desktop IDE.
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CLOUD COMPUTING
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