Not just another About.me clone: Create gorgeous ‘portable’ websites with Sidengo

We’ve seen our fair share of About.me clones, making it easy to create a landing page for yourself, or your business, in a matter of minutes. Sidengo (pronounced ‘see-den-goh’) is a new service which takes a page from About.me, but builds on it, allowing you to create an entire multi-page website.

Rather than limit yourself to just one paragraph and links to your online profiles, with Sidengo, you can create multiple pages and display a gallery of photos, powered by Flickr.

Created by Mexican entrepreneurs Gabriel Garza and Jorge González, Sidengo not only makes it easy to create a site in a matter of minutes, it’s mobile friendly, embeddable, and you can generate a QR code and iPhone/iPad homescreen icon for your site.

Setting up your site

Getting started with Sidengo, the first thing you’ll want to do is choose a site title, slogan and select a category for your site. You can also upload a logo and choose an image for your background.

Each Sidengo site can have up to three additional pages of content, along with a gallery of images and a contact page. You can use these pages to share any text and images of your choice. You can let visitors know more about you with a dedicated ‘About’ page, showcase your products and services, and more.

Once you’ve filled in up to 3 sections, you can then share your Flickr photo gallery simply by pasting your Flickr URL into the settings. We’d love to see other sites supported by Sidengo, as well as other forms of media. Showcasing Vimeo or YouTube videos, for example, would no doubt be a useful feature.

The next step is to decide what contact information you want to include on your site, which also includes a handy Google Map showing visitors exactly where you’re located. Of course, if you don’t want to share your address or pinpoint your location on a map, you don’t have to.

Finally, there are four ‘apps’ available in Sidengo. You can embed a Facebook page, Twitter profile, a YouTube video (just one), and a Slideshare slideshow onto your site.

Once your Sidengo site is ready, you can use a custom domain, upload a favicon and even download a QR code pointing to your site. You can also create an iPhone/iPad icon which will be added to iOS users homescreens. One of Sidengo’s most unique features is the ability to generate embeddable widgets which you can share anywhere on the web.

Brands can also embed their sites on their Facebook profiles, provided they still have access to tabbed pages. With the timeline coming to brand pages at the end of the month, whether they like it or not, one of the main features marketeers are losing is tabbed pages. Sidengo will have to find a different way to allow users to share their sites on the social network.

Our verdict

There’s no limit to how Sidengo can be used – it can be turned into an elaborate online CV, it can be used as a way to showcase your work whether you’re a freelance writer, designer, photographer or developer, or it can even be used to create a site for your new startup or small business.

Sidengo’s WYSISWYG platform makes it incredibly easy for anyone to set up a site in a matter of minutes, without the need for any design or HTML knowledge whatsoever.

What’s really great about the way that Sidengo works is that you can pick and choose which features to include in your site. If you don’t have a logo, you can simply use text as an alternative. If you don’t have a slogan, simply leave the section blank. What you can’t select, however, is the font, which is definitely a much-needed feature for a personalized design.

While we love Sidengo giving users the option to embed Twitter and Facebook profiles, we all probably have several other online profiles we want to share with visitors. The ability to just link to these profiles would definitely suffice so that visitors know where else to find us.

The final product is a slick, professional looking site, and with the custom domain feature, Sidengo users don’t have to make any compromises. Atlanta-based bistro, La Fourchette gives a great example of how Sidengo’s sites can really come to life.

Pricing has yet to be revealed on the site, but once beta testing is complete, we can assume that many of these premium-like features will come at a cost.

Sidengo is not the first About.me-like website creator that we’ve seen. IM Creator and Onepager bring similar easy-to-use services, but sets itself apart with its embeddable features.

What do you think of Sidengo? Let us know in the comments.

➤ Sidengo