I noticed a post on Web Worker Daily about new site creation software SiteKreator, and naturaly being in the site creation software business I thought I would have a look.

While I respect their aims to produce easy to create, professional looking sites for business, and I agree visualy the sites contain many elegant elements and some interesting functionality they unfortunately fall down on some issues.

What about standards?

First is the sites do not comply with any W3C standards on HTML, XHTML, CSS or Accessibility. So? I here you ask. Well I’m not doing the big why use web standards thing right now, but when you get a plumber / electrician / builder in to fix your house, and they shake their head, suck their teeth and mutter “which cowboy did this?”, then bill you twice as much, you can see that acceptable standards have their place.

What about the visualy impaired?

Second they are not accessible to non-visual readers. I tried to load one into screen reader emulation software ‘Fangs‘ and simply nothing appeared. Not good.

What about the Search Engines?

Third they don’t work without javascript. This means that you are at the mercy of whatever browser you view this with to ‘build’ your page correctly. It also means that your page load time is longer as the browser must both load, parse and then also build the site. Plus (and here’s the killer for small business), search engine spiders don’t run javascript. Oh dear.

Oh for goodness sake…

Finally the page that is created is still partially table based. Come on, it’s not 1998 anymore, there is no excuse.

OK you say, easy to point the finger. So here’s what I will do. Once I get a working prototype of RapidSite going (probably 3 weeks hence), I will place it on the web and invite all to test, mock, jeer, break and generally rubbish it. Why? It’s called usability testing.