Berta.me – A Simple Website Creation App
To quote myself, from two months ago:
”Building websites can be like a rocket science if you don’t have the slightest idea how to do it.”
That sentence is still correct in my case, but luckily, today, providers are trying to give us user-friendly applications. Berta.me is one of those.
Berta is a simple, open sourced tool for building websites. You can call it CMS if you want. For those who don‘t know, CMS is short for Content Management System. That is a computer program that allows you to publish, edit, modify and maintain content from a central interface.
Berta is a simple web application for creating web portfolio, your company website or online shop. No database or programming knowledge needed. That can be helpful if you are always having a problem to explain others how to carry out ideas out of your head and into reality.
Who Uses It and How To Start
You start with simple registration, and after you have received an e-mail with your password you are ready to go. If you are, like me, in need of some inspiration, they have a section called Happy Websites, where you can see websites that are made by other users. There you can see that Berta is mostly used by creative people, like artists, designers, illustrators, architects, photographers etc.
They have recently made a survey among the current users to see what are they using Berta for. It showed that the creative bunch is a very big chunk of users, which was obvious from their Happy Websites section. They mostly used it to show their work, for online promotion or portfolio. Two biggest advantages of the app in the survey were flexible templates and the ease of use. And in today’s mobile world, it’s good to know that your website will be mobile ready.
But How Easy?
The template design editor is quite simplistic and clear. If you want to change font, background image, page layout etc. there is a separate tab for each section so you won’t change background color by accident if you wanted to change the font color. The Settings part can enable you to work with other templates and other general things like naming your site, how will page layout look like etc.
If you have a general idea how your site will look like, all you need is some patience for the technical part of sizing your font, choosing style for your hyperlinks and so on. After that you click on ”my site” and then comes the fun part. You simply drag and drop and put all things where you want them to. Here you also add gallery content to it.
Helping Hand
One of the most useful things in the editor was explanations to what is what – a little dictionary per se. For example, I had no idea what tiling is and why my background needs it. I didn’t have to google it because just on the right was an explanation saying it’s the way my background fills my screen. Also, there is some help with CSS values on the bottom of the editor for units and margins.
If you are not sure how to do something I could refer you to their Vimeo page, but it has only three videos that you can watch or skip first time you enter the editor. They are quite basic and too fast in showing how to do something. However, YouTube page has more videos that are better at explaining some specific stuff like how to make a thumbnail with the background gallery or a complete tutorial on how to create an online shop, but most helpful was Berta CMS Facebook page.
Paying For The Deed
Of course, this is all on 30 days free trial basis. If you want to make it beyond that, you’ll ned to pay. For Berta Basic, where you get 1 Gb of storage space, you’ll pay €19.99. Berta Pro for €49.99 gives you 3 Gb of storage space plus own FTP. In the end for €95.99 you’ll get Berta Shop which includes a shop plug-in with PayPal integration.
In conclusion, Berta.me is a quite useful tool. It helps you all the way through to your final product that is your portfolio, online shop or fully functional website and you don’t have to be a CSS programmer to do it. Editor isn’t flashy but it’s very helpful and allows you to create your very flashy site. In short, it can give you the website you want.
