If I told you that you can now create websites via your iPhone or iPod Touch in less than a minute would you believe me? That’s what new app Zapd claims. While I was skeptical—surely it can’t be that easy, surely there’s some fine print—I’m pleased to say that Zapd does exactly what it claims to do, beautifully.
Zapd is pretty darn cool and you can start creating a mobile-optimized site immediately after download. Choose your Zapd’s design from the 20 currently available themes, then enter the site’s name and add your content: text, photos or links. I started my first site by choosing a photo from my library and adding a caption. When you tap the photo widget the camera opens by default and that added a few seconds to the process.
Since I tend to work from my camera roll whenever I post a photo anywhere, I’d love to see an option to change this default in the future. I do like that Zapd includes a crop box so you can zoom in on photo details if you want. I was also quickly able to add a line of writing through the text widget and added a link just to see what happens. Content appears on the site in the order you post it, but changing the order was only a matter of pulling items around.
Easy.
To actually publish your site to the web, you will need to setup a Zapd account either using your Facebook login or by creating one through Zapd (use the bottom “sign up” link to do the latter). Registration was instantaneous. When you publish your site, you’ll be shown a preview option so you can see what will go live. You can also use the postcard interface to write a short note to send with the link you share with friends, either via Facebook, Twitter or email.
I sent an email to myself and received an invitation to view my site instantly. I’ll be interested to see how Zapd’s unique addresses change as the service is used more, but for now they’re short and sweet—visit zm.zapd.co if you want to see my dog sleeping in laundry. Once your site is live, Zapd makes it simple to make changes, be it adding or deleting content or changing the theme entirely through the settings panel. Just be sure to republish your site to save your modifications.
As cool as I think Zapd is now, I’m even more excited to see the future updates promised by Seattle-based creators PressPlane Inc, which includes plans for additional themes, support for video posting, commenting and custom URLs. Download Zapd immediately and start creating.
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