Symo's Design Portfolio

Hotglue.me is a unique tool for web publishing, meaning that users are able to use it with minimal to no prior knowledge of either web development or coding skills. The easy-to-use product is ideal for beginners and enables those with more experience and knowledge to download their site to their own web server should they want to.

Using the click of a mouse/track pad, hotglue.me enables the user to add, delete or edit anything that they want to. This can be done quickly and simply in order to make their website as unique and personal as they want depending on the intended use of the site.
Single and double clicks on the mouse/track pad lead to different menu options in a simple picture format as shown below.

Introduction ...

Single Clicking gives the following images and options:

Top Left: Add a new text objective
Top Right: Upload a file
Bottom Left: Embed another website
Bottom Right: Embed a Youtube or Vimeo Video

Double Clicking gives the following images and options:

Top Left: Change page title
Top Centre: Change the page's URL
Top Right: Make this the start page
Upper Left: Change the background Colour
Upper Centre: Create a new page
Upper Right: Delete page
Lower Left: Upload a background image
Lower Centre: Adjust background image selection
Lower Right: List all pages
Bottom Left: Add/Edit custom code
Bottom Centre: Compare revisions of this page
Bottom Right: Show/Hide grid or change grid size by dragging

Below is a Video that Hotglue.me released to explain the basics of the service they provide to any potential users.

My first attempt at using Hotglue.me was interesting as it was easy to use and anyone could quickly adapt to using it based on its simplicity. The first session was used for us to not only find out how it worked but also to discover it's many flaws.
Flaws aside for the moment, my verdict of Hotglue.me is very positive. For a beginner or for someone that wants to be able to set up a starting website for the likes of a business. As it's free, and it's easy to use with helpful tutorial videos from the Hotglue.me website, it benefits those who don't have huge amounts of disposable income to waste.

However Hotglue.me does have limitations. For those who have a greater range of knowledge and experience, it may be more preferable for them to build a website using coding skills such as 'C' language, HTML and Java. The content manipulation system's biggest flaws are to do with the consistency when creating a full website, regarding colour schemes and font. It isn't impossible to get the exact same colour, font size and style throughout a full website using Hotglue.me although, it is a very tedious way of doing things. To get them all to match up when the rest of the system is so quick and simple to use is difficult without knowledge of coding. Another issue I found was the lack of margin settings. I found that you could place a grid over the page to get all of the content lined up however it would have been easier to code a margin. Another issue which I found when trying to fill the screen was that it didn't always optimise effectively on a number of different devices.

Having pointed out the flaws with Hotglue.me it must be said that there are many positives to it. For example you are able to add code into the system should you have prior knowledge of coding. This does help to limit the flaws, although, should a beginner with no knowledge be the user, the issues would still be apparent. With this in mind it makes life harder to try and make a professional looking website using this system without code, which essentially is what everyone is trying to achieve.