Striking.ly: A Simple Way to Make Beautiful One Page Sites

Nowadays, it doesn’t take much to make your own website. You could probably go right now, get a site up say on WordPress.com, and have it running in about 5-10 minutes without even need to know anything about writing code. That’s made a basic site not enough. If you are like me, you not only want to create a website, but you want it to look good and to work well, but also not cost an arm and a leg. But still, you’ll likely want to create sites for all of your projects.

I’ve recently been trying out a new web app called Strikingly, which carves out its own niche for creating sites. It is not quite as powerful as WordPress, but still has some outstanding features. Let’s take a look at Strikingly in depth.

Creating Your Site

Strikingly stands apart from the competition by making it easy to create a detailed site all in one page. Instead of having multiple different pages for everything, you just have one long one with different sections, and you can choose to either scroll through them or click on a heading to go to that topic. Put that together with first-class mobile support, and you’ve got a simple way to make a stylish modern one-page site.

When you first sign up to create your site, you are asked to choose from one of the templates that are provided. They are broken up into three main categories: business or project, personal site, or portfolio. Within each category there is a small handful of templates that you can choose from. Once you find one that you like, you can select it and now start to create your own site.

What is nice about Strikingly is that just about every part of the template is customizable so that you can make it your own. You can also follow the template exactly as it is meant to be and just replace the information that is there with your own, or you can erase things and put in other words or pictures that suite you. When you want to edit text, you are given decent text options where you can choose from a variety of fonts and a few other options.

If the template you choose has a background or picture(s), you can easily change it to use something that you like. The nice part is that it also comes with a picture editor where you can add effects and manipulate your background to your specifications using Aviary within the app. I really liked that they gave you a variety of options for your pictures, where you can just leave it the way it is or you can do things to make it suit your needs.

Lastly, if you choose a template that has headings, you can choose to use them, take them away, add or change them to what works for you. They make it really easy to do this with a side bar with all of the template headings. Also, everything from the arrangement of them to the different parts of your page, can all be moved, to a certain degree, on the page so that you can organize it the way you want to.

Previewing and Publishing

When you are done creating your site, you can now preview and publish for the world to see. What I absolutely loved about Strikingly is that they create your template for not only the web on the desktop, but for the iPad and iPhone, and you can see previews of each and what it would look like in their respective device. I loved that I didn’t have to do anything different to make it optimized for mobile devices.

When you are ready to publish your site, you can create your own custom link for it and then share it to your social feeds. You can change your link at any time if for any reason you need to do this. If you want to use your own custom domain, you can choose to go with a paid version of Strikingly.

Pricing Plans

Speaking of paid versions, there are a couple to choose from. Plans can start as low as $8/month and go up to $20/month, depending on whether you want to pay monthly or by the year. With the two plans you get a variety of features that are not included above, which include multiple sites, more bandwidth, HTML/CSS editing (for those who do want to dig into the code), and much more. If you are just looking for a simple site, then the free version should be more than enough for you if you don’t mind not having your own custom domain. But, if you are like me and want more flexibility and the ability to do more with your site, you are going to want to upgrade.

Intrigued

That’s the word that came to mind after playing around with Strikingly for a little while. For the free version, there is a lot that you can do, and I really like that they optimize your site for you for iOS devices. Not only that, but the end product can look really sharp, and you don’t have to put a whole lot of effort to make it look that way. I like that I had so many options to choose from to design my site the way that I wanted it. That being said, I can see how someone who is brand new to website creation can get a little overwhelmed because you have so many features that you can use to customize your page.

In the end, I think Strikingly is geared toward the business-minded person, as is evident in their templates. In fact as I was using this, I couldn’t help but think that LinkedIn needs to seriously take a look at this company and make them an offer they can’t refuse. These templates would go great with LinkedIn’s model, at least in my opinion.

Whether you are looking for a site to promote yourself, a product, or just want to have a landing page, I would highly consider that you take a look at Strikingly. The ease of use, flexibility, and features, make it a solid option for quickly creating your own site, whether you’re a coder or not.