Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

There are numerous reasons for learners and educators to create their own websites. In many instances, blogs and wikis are more than adequate, and they offer convenient tools for adding text, graphics, and multi-media content. In this post, I’m discussing a free alternative option for creating and hosting websites.

SynthaSite has assembled a set of online tools so that anyone can create a professional looking website. Since the tools are online, teams can easily work together to create web pages. SynthaSite goes a step further by also offering free hosting. I used SynthaSite to put together and host a 5-page trial website, where I posted a variety of media. (http://digitalstuffbypaul.synthasite.com/) Although there are some significant limitations (eg. no real options for sidebars), my overall impression of SynthaSite was positive.

The Synthasite user interface is straightforward and reasonably intuitive, with lots of dragging and dropping. Still, SynthaSite is probably not intended for the complete neophyte. For example, there are convenient widgets for embedding video from major players such as Youtube or Google Video. On the other hand, to embed video from Animoto, VoiceThread and PhotoShow, I had to paste the embed code into the “html widget”, and I had to figure this out for myself.

As an experiment, I decided to try and replicate my SynthaSite website with Google’s Page Creator. I was somewhat surprised to discover that while the Google alternative may be a little slicker, it is even less user-friendly in some respects. For example, despite the fact that they are part of the Google pantheon, there isn’t a convenient option for embedding Youtube or Google Video on Google Pages. In the end, I didn’t complete my site with Google Pages because it was going to take too long–at least as long as with Synthasite.

There is one additional, and potentially major, bonus with Synthasite. If you wish to use your own server to host your site, it’s easy to download from SynthaSite as a zipped file for that purpose.