Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Jux


Don't think of Jux as a personal webpage. Unlike sites such as Flavors.me or About.me, Jux isn't a stepping-stone to other sites where you do your actual posting (like social netowrks). Instead, Jux is an almost perfect hybrid between a graphically-oriented personal landing page and a full website portfolio.

How to Jux
To get started on Jux, create an account for a site that will live at username.jux.com (or setup a domain name through a third party to point to the page). You're greeted with a page proclaiming "Let's make some magic." The magical choices are to dive right in by creating self-promoting text, or uploading images or video.

For example, click the "Blockquote" option and you get what would be the meat of the site on services like Flavors: uploading a big, bold, beautiful background image with a bit of text to draw people into your site. Jux can upload not only from your hard drive (via drag and drop, an excellent feature), but also from your accounts at Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram. You can set the style of the background photo to take up the entire screen or just parts of it. You also control the text by adjusting the typeface (there are 15 options), point size, and color. You can pick a placement of the blockquote on screen by left, right or center, but that's it. The only item you can drag around the screen at this point is the control dialog box.

That big image isn't your main site view, like it would be on About.me or Flavors.me. When you're done you're taken to the real main page?the "My Stuff" page?which has a link to that "blockquote" page. Click the text on the My Stuff page to edit the name for the site, plus add your Twitter handle and a link to another site. That's as landing-page-esque as Jux gets.

What you really need to do is click "Add New" to create more content. For example, click "Article" provides the same interface for entering text and an image that you got for "Blockquote," albeit with more space for text?it's more of a blog entry. Other things you can insert: "StreetView," a straight-up Google Maps street view embed of any address you pick; video from Youtube or Vimeo; a slideshow collection of still images with individual captions; and a "Countdown," which appears to be just another way of creating a themed slideshow.

Keep adding items and they'll be layered into the My Stuff page. Eventually you'll end up with a full, personal website, with each page individually linkable. The newest content, based on the timestamp, appears at top; you can change the order on the "My Stuff" page by altering the time stamp. Jux even supports Google Analytics if you want to track your site traffic. The latest update to Jux lets you create multiple "Juxes" or sites from one single account, so you can have a Jux for different portfolios.

Not Your Stepping Stone
Unlike landing pages such as Flavors.me?which are all about people clicking again to leave and visit other sites where you post, such as Facebook, Twitter, or your own blog?Jux wants to be the final destination. Jux is a great place to you post your thoughts and pics and videos. It even includes RSS feeds for your future subscribers. (It's not, however, as friendly for writing in as true blogging platforms like Blogger or WordPress.)

Because Jux wants to be the destination, not the stepping stone, it eschews obvious links out (with the exception of providing that link to a Twitter account on your My Stuff home page). However, if you import media from Facebook or Youtube, a little "info" link appears on that content with a link back. You can use standard HTML href tags to add links, but it's not quite is pretty as the pre-fabbed links Flavors.me offers. Your site visitors can share your page or posts via Twitter, Facebook, or email using a drop down menu. In fact, other Jux users can become followers of your site, because no company builds a site without some useless, extra social networking in it.

As a destination site, however, Jux is pretty damn beautiful. It won't replace Flavors.me as our Editors' Choice for a set-it-and-forget-it landing page, but Jux a great place for someone with a serious portfolio of multimedia and no serious technology skills to launch a site or sites that need simple, constant tending.

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