You Too Can Build a Site in Minutes

I woke up one recent morning with a gravelly voice that was about an octave lower than usual. Think Lauren Bacall meets Tom Waits.

In other words, I had a terrible cold.

It seemed like a good day to stay home and create a website. (Hey, it's almost as good as watching daytime TV.)

Once upon a time, that would have been tough to do in a day. In the dark ages of the Internet -- the 1990s -- building a website took hours of painstaking coding in HTML, the arcane formatting language of Web pages.

But since then Web design software has made it possible to make a decent site by just pointing and clicking or dragging and dropping. It still can be a laborious process, but at least there's little or no HTML coding.

More recently, Web authoring tools have continued to evolve, claiming to make it easy for non-programmers to create truly attractive and sophisticated sites. I wanted to test that premise, so I took some non-drowsy cold medicine and tried two site-building tools: Apple Computer Inc.'s new iWeb program and the popular Blogger software that's part of the Google Inc. online empire.

Blogger (www.blogger.com) is free and can be used with Windows or Macintosh computers.

As you can tell by the name, it was specifically designed for creating blogs, the online journals that every tech-head or political activist seems to have these days.

But it's also a handy way to make a good-looking, personal website with text and photos, even if you don't have the urge to inflict your every thought and opinion on the world.

Blogger has 12 basic templates to choose from, each with spaces to be filled in for titles, a short self-profile of the site creator and then text and pictures.

The templates provide variations in layout, backgrounds and colors -- some are minimalist, others a bit flashier. But all are straightforward enough to ensure that your design won't detract from the content.

I chose one of the more minimalist templates, which had a subtle brown tint in the background to suggest high-quality letter writing paper. As if I had written a letter in years.

Filling in text was simply a matter of typing into a blank "edit" box. All of the page creation and editing takes place online via your Web browser; there's no software to install on your computer.

By clicking on the preview function, I could see how the text would look on the actual Web page.