Miles Mendoza's Website of the Day ... and more!

Euro 2008

>> Euro 2008 – Official site
>> BBC Sport: European Championships Video Archive
>> Five Live: Who Will You Support Interactive Map
>> The Silly Season

100 Jobs

>> 100 Jobs

Hats off to Oliver Davies of Middleborough, who spent 5 months “getting turned down for a whole range of jobs that I’m perfectly qualified for, so I decided to apply for 100 jobs that I’m clearly not suited for and see what happens”. Oliver’s blog chronicles the success (or otherwise) of his applications for roles including:

• Male Escort
• Head of Programme Acquisition at Chanenl 4
• Chief Executive of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts
• Artistic Director for the International Dance Festival Ireland.
• Guitarist in Thrash Metal band Bleed The Sky.
• Part-time Antelope Keeper with the Oregon Wildlife Foundation

Create a free website in 10 minutes (or less)

>> Shortal
One question which comes up regularly in the Website of the Day mailbag is “How can I put together a basic website with no technical experience?”
There are a range of free online tools available which enable you to create a site by customising a template in your web browser – There’s no need to download any extra software, and no technical knowledge is necessary.

What makes Shortal different to many of the existing tools is both its ease of use and its flexibility. If you can send an email, use a word processor, or find an existing website you already know enough to set up a page on Shortal – Simply sign up for a free account, fill in your name and contact details and write one paragraph describing yourself, your business or the subject of your site, and Shortal can use that information to lay out a basic homepage for you.

From there you can edit your existing page (changing layout, colours and adding pictures) or add as many pages as you want. There are page templates suited to small business sites, online photo albums, hobby sites, online CV’s and weblogs. Shortal also provides secure online document storage and sharing.
The free service is funded by advertising at the top of each page or you can upgrade to a premium service to remove the ads.

Alternatively ….
Other free online site-builder tools include Yahoo Geocities, Lycos WebBuilder and Freewebs all of which are worth a look, but be aware that the adverts on Geocities and Lycos sites can be overly intrusive.
If you want to create a journal site or weblog rather than a traditional site, there are even more options available. In addition to the afore-mentioned sites there are many dedicated free ‘blog’ providers.
>> Read Miles’ guide to the best ‘blog’ providers

See also:
>> BBC Webwise: How can I build my own site?

Shoes, Shoes and more shoes

>> The Shoe Project
I own about 6 pairs of shoes. Mrs Website of the Day owns nearer to 50 pairs, and considers that number woefully inadequate. I know at least 3 other women whose enthusiasm for shoes borders on obsession, and I've given up trying to understand! But this is a site aimed at all of them: It's just lots and lots of photos of shoes, but they're such good pics, displayed with such passion that even a non-shoe lover like myself, can start to see the appeal.

Free website for Charity

Website of the Day: Wednesday July 28th

>> Free Website for Charity
This site gives you all the tools you need to get your own site online to help your charitable cause. There’s no need for any special software or technical expertise, as you can create the whole site through your web browser.

The service is ideally suited to shorter term fund-raising projects or ideas because the site you build is free for 6 months. If you want to keep a site live after the initial 6 month period you’ll start paying a monthly fee of £7.

It’s one of the quickest and easiest online site builders I’ve seen to date. The whole service is driven by a companion site called Quick on the Net who specialise in providing a similar (paid-for) service to small businesses and home users – and they reckon that you can get a basic site online in just 5 clicks.

To start putting your site together, just choose from a large range of templates, site layouts and colour schemes and that instantly creates a basic site which you can preview with no commitment before you sign up. When you’ve got the look you like, then you enter in the text that is specific to your charity and upload your own logo or photos. And Bob is indeed your genial and charity-supporting uncle!

If you want to try out a free online web-building service aimed at home users rather than businesses or charities, take a look at my guide to weblogs for beginners, or my selection of free web building software on Radio 2’s Webwise pages.

Blogging for Beginners

Website of the Day: Tuesday May 25th

>> BBC Webwise: What is Blogging
>> BBC Webwise: How do I get my own blog?

One of the biggest online phenomena of the last 18 months or so is the rise of blogs and blogging. Blog is short for web log, and at it’s simplest a web log is a frequently updated personal website in the form of an online diary or journal, which carries copious links to other sites. Blogging is almost certainly the quickest and simplest way to get your own website – No special software or technical skills are needed – Just register with a blogging site, choose from a range of designs, and you’re ready to go in less than five minutes.

But which blogging site should you choose? Read on for a quick guide to some of the options

Blogger.com
This is the best known and one of the longest established of all the blogging sites – It was bought last year by Google, and has just been given a complete overhaul to make it even easier to use. To get started, you just register with Blogger, choose a name for your blog, then pick from a range of design templates and away you go. New features include the facility to update your blog via email and for site visitors to add comments on your posts

Diaryland.com
As the name suggests, this service is more geared towards online diaries than journalistic blogs, with features and designs customised to that end. Diaries can be password-protected and you can add other DiaryLand users’ diaries to your own favourite list.

Xanga.com
Recent recipient of Web User magazine’s gold award for best free weblog tool. A setup wizard guides you through the creation of your blog, helping you fine tune the design and add personal information and a photo. There are more features for personalisation than Blogger, with the option to add news feeds, background music, a guestbook and images of your favourite CDs, books and video games.

Livejournal.com
This is the biggest of all the diary-based sites, with a real sense of community and the opportunity to link the diaries of other livejournal users together to read their comments on a single page. IT has also spawned a spate of fictitious journals written by TV characters like the cast of Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 24!

20six
Probably the best-established UK-based blogging service – A bit less beginner-friendly than Blogger, but some extra features including the facility to post by SMS and sending photographs from your mobile

Typepad
One of the most fully-featured of all Blogging sites – Unlike the others mentioned so far, Typead offers no free service – prices range from $5-$15 a month, but for this you get many more features, including complete design flexibility, online photo albums, and most usefully, the facility to sort posts by category (like on this site).

For more blog reviews see
>> Web User Magazine Blogging Site roundup
>> Guardian Online’s Weblog Software Reviews

Further Reading:
>> BBC News on the relaunch of blogger.com
>> Guardian Online’s Best of British Blogging
>> BBC News on Mobile Blogging
>> Buzznet Photoblogs
>> Eatonweb Blog portal
>> Germars.com: Blogging For Beginners