Websites for Newbies
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Have you ever thought about making your own website but were scared away by not knowing what you’d actually do with it?
If so, Adobe’s new app Slate gives you the perfect opportunity to try out the concept with zero commitment, zero learning and very little time investment. The end result may surprise you because Adobe has spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how to make beautiful websites that are super easy to create and accessible to everyone for free.
What is Adobe Slate? It’s a brand new, easy way for anyone to create their own one page website…for free! Slate was released in April 2015 with an app for the iPad first. But Adobe seems to be really, genuinely committed to making simple and beautiful creation tools available to everyone. They followed up the iPad release with a web app in October 2015. Apps for iPhone and Android devices are said to be in the works.
If you haven’t explored the free apps that Adoboe has come up with in the last few years for ios, you really should. There’s a wealth of free tools that give users access to surprisingly powerful creation and editing functions that at one time in the not too distant past was only possible using computers. Below is a sampling of Adobe’s current apps for iPhones and iPads.
What You Need to Get Started
In addition to being free and simple, all it takes to get started is either a Facebook account or an email address, and, either a computer or an iPad.
You need the email or Facebook account to create and signin to an Adobe ID and Adobe’s Creative Cloud Service. Anyone who setups this free account gets 2GB’s of free storage. Be forewarned that Adobe will try to upsell you a 20GB plan for $1.99 a month…but don’t even consider this because I’ve been using many of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps for years and I’m nowhere near the 2GB limit yet. Plus that, your new Slate creations won’t even count against your Creative Cloud storage. Rather, Adobe provides a link for your new site that they host for free at Slate.com.
The 2nd thing you’ll need is an iPad or a computer. Sadly, Adobe has not yet made the Slate app available for iPhones or Android users.
What You Could Do with Your Website
Here are some examples of what others have done with their Slate websites. The first 2 examples were created by kids. The 2nd 2 show one small business owner’s weekly newsletter and one photographer’s photo journal of a recent encounter with Snowy owls.
Which brings me to a suggestion for anyone who’s ever considered the idea of creating a website but isn’t sure what to do with it yet.
Everyone has photographs they would like to share. Whether it’s photos from a recent event or get-together or old ones that have been scanned in to share and reminisce with friends and family. But few people actually ever share their virtual photo albums because finding good ways to share them has, up until now, been difficult.
There Just Aren’t Good Ways to Easily Share a Simple Photo Album with Friends and Family
Consider the alternatives right now (in February 2016.) Facebook is a great alternative if all of your friends and family are on Facebook…but everyone I know has at least a few holdouts who just won’t get with the program. iCloud photo sharing isn’t as simple or easy as it claims to be, therefore it’s just never taken off the way Apple had intended. Plus that, although iCloud photos can be shared with non ios people…no on really knows that! Like iCloud Photos, Google Photos is amazing, but it’s also not all that easy and intuitive to use. And can be even harder to share!
The main problem with all of the current methods of sharing photos is that they are limited by who can participate or they just take too much time and effort to actually be useful for most people.
That’s where Adobe Slate really shines. It gives virtually everyone a really simple way to quickly and easily share some photos with EVERYONE! No one is excluded…because the end product is a simple one page website that was easy to make and stunning for even those of us who didn’t inherit the creative gene.
Why Don’t You Give Slate a Try and Post a Link to What You Make in the Comments Section Below?
Further Reading
Here are a few links to additional resources about Adobe Slate
Adobe’s webpage introduces Slate and gives some good examples
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