Freewebs has launched a new “social publishing” site called Pagii, aimed at crafting highly stylized personal web pages. It’s termed social publishing because the service isn’t only for crafting user profiles, but also crafting layouts for any other content such as scrapbooks.
Pages are designed with a very flexible AJAX page editor that lets users drag, drop, and resize objects and place them anywhere on the page. It’s the kind of system any heavy MySpace user would love. The system doesn’t adhere to a grid layout and allows objects to be layered one on top of another with varying opacities. A lot of the style objects and effects are vector based (SVG), making it possible to rotate and resize them without sacrificing quality. It allows for adding nice effects like reflections and animations to page elements as well.
Objects supported by the editor include shapes, photos, text, html, and Pagii widgets. Pagii widgets allow you to add basic social networking modules such as friends, comments, and personal bio to your page. They can be reskinned to match the rest of the page design. Supporting html code in the widgets means you can also add your favorite embeddable widgets from other services too.
Pagii’s editor creates some of the most flexible layouts I’ve seen, but that kind of flexibility may seem chaotic to some. Other editors like Webjam, Weebly, Synthasite, and Jimdo have taken a more structured approach, following the grid layouts that have become the norm for websites.
