Quick Pitch: Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using content from around the web, ideal for homepages and brand marketing.
Genius Idea: It's becoming common place for web users to have a presence on a number of different social media sites, especially those of us who use the web for professional purposes. The challenge then becomes picking the destination to direct contacts that represents you best, or trying to tie all of the sites together in an elegant manner.
Flavors.me (referred to as just Flavors) tackles both of those challenges, providing you with a easy-to-design website that can serve as your personal homepage, microsite or splash page. Flavors is ridiculously simple to use and includes a four-section design panel that's user-friendly and makes creating an aesthetically pleasing page a just-add-water experience.
Users can enter their name and bio in the About section and start to populate their Flavors home. In the Services section, users can then opt to add up to 19 different web accounts to their site. Content from each added service is automatically refreshed and pulled into the Flavors site.
The Design section is where everything comes to life. Here users can select from a pool of different layouts, each with their own flare for organizing the connected services. For example, the Basic layout displays the user's name and bio with social sites listed below on one side. When visitors click on a service name they are then presented with the dynamic updates from that service on the opposite side of the page.
The Design section also lets users upload their own background image, adjust the color scheme with color palettes or individual color selections, and tweak fonts.
Users can then promote their site via various social media channels and adjust site metadata for search engines in the Promote section.
The full Flavors experience -- which includes metadata, additional fonts, layouts, analytics, a contact form and a custom domain -- costs $20 a year, but a respectable scaled-down version is also available free of charge.
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the "new CloudApp()" contest - use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”