This week I've been working on a couple of websites, one for my classroom and one for a presentation for my local school district. I really wanted to become familiar with the format and functionality of a variety of different free options, so I explored Weebly, Wix, and Goggle Sites. I have learned a lot through this experience and have pretty strong feelings about what I'd recommend. I started building my classroom website through Weebly, and love how it turned out. You can see it here. Right now it has a bunch of numbers as the URL, because I have not upgraded to include a personal web address, although for $4 dollars a month, I will likely build that into my school budget when I return to the classroom. Weebly is intuitive to use, and its drag and drop features make it easy to build a beautiful, professional looking website. There are hundreds of templates to choose from, and the customization possibilities are endless.
For an iPad PD course, I started with the Google Sites option, because (up until this experience) I love most of what the GAFE system has to offer. This website builder, is not as user friendly as Weebly, but I am not one to give up easily. After all was said and done, I made the ugliest webpage ever! I am proud of the content the site contains, but aesthetically speaking, it leaves a lot to be desired. You can see that website here. I was in too deep.....with the presentation too near by the time I decided I wanted to ditch Sites. The old, perfectionist me would've stayed up way too late for way too many nights and re-built it. But this is a new era, with a new, more realistic (or maybe slightly overworked) me, where I am letting it go, and moving on.
I do know where I'm headed next though....for my next website project, I will be trying out Wix. It is very similar to Weebly with it's drag and drop features, and it's simple designs end up looking sleek and sophisticated rather than the archaic and blocky look of Sites.
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