Zinadoo lets anyone create Web sites to fit your mobile phone
You don't need programming skills, just a browser, to create Web sites to fit almost any mobile phone. Zinadoo's free, engaging service is clean interface design made easy.
Zinadoo promises to create a home for you on the Web; a site of your own devising that will be accessible to your friends and jealous frenemies from any device. I'd yawn if not for the fact that Zinadoo, like so many other Webutainment or social networking sites, offers an engaging activity with good usability that really delivers.
Register a site name and it's smooth sailing to a four-part WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) site creator that's built with Adobe Flash Player. File controls that add another Web page, upload an image, and so on live on the left sidebar. It's also one point for publishing. You type your Web content directly into a large rectangular authoring field, and play with text formatting and hyperlinks from the nearby options menu. Click a button to preview the fledgling site on an emulator, and another to generate your site's URL (here's mine.)
Editing is as easy as logging in and typing over what you wrote, then republishing. The hardest part of the process is supplying the content.
Then you name your site, give it a description and tags, and start sharing by way of e-mail, text message, or publishing to MySpace.
Zinadoo's viral monetizing scheme first comes in with a pay-per-text service, which ended up a moot point as I didn't attempt to use my free credits for phones in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or the antipodes. Zinadoo craftily subtracted my free credit regardless.
Upgrading from a zinadoo.mobi to a sleeker .mobi suffix is another way to relieve your credit card or PayPal account and enter to win recognition for your creation. It's also a service that makes more sense for corporate or small business managers who, with no extra training, can create sites already formulated to fit the small screen.
My Zinadoo site checked out on a Treo 700, Motorola Slvr, an undisclosed BlackBerry, and desktop Firefox, though the latter looked strange since the site is truly laid out for mobile screen dimensions.
The fact that the Web application automatically resizes its borders and images to fit the user's phone is reason enough to forgive the lack of spell check support and some actions that, once committed, resist editing. Forgiven, but let's also hope these few quibbles are soon ironed out.