Zooloo Makes It Easy For You To Design Your Own Web Portal

By: Karan Goel | 2nd November 2009

Zooloo provides you one place to create, connect and control your online life, including your own website, dashboard, widgets, blog, news, social networks, photos, and videos. While this may sound ambitious, Zooloo is geared towards inexperienced users who want a simple way to design their own website for free and engage in their favorite online activities.

Zooloo consists of the following components that you can use to design your own portal website for free:

• zSocial: Social networking with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with single status update across all networks
• Dashboard: Personalized dashboard for news, photos, events, email, etc.
• Site Creator: Website and blog builder with themes and widgets
• Privacy Manager: Control who sees which parts of your website
• Photos/Videos: Online photo organizer and video library
• Calendar: Calendar, address book, reminders and to-do lists
• Entertainment & Shopping: Customized online entertainment for music, movies, etc. and favorite shopping sites

Homepage with Social Networking

The homepage has a search box at the top, zStatus and zSocial on the main page, and widgets on the right to upload photos, access email, calendar and your blog.

zStatus is a status update box from where you can update your status across Zooloo, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Below that is zSocial, where you can interact with these social networks. Clicking the tab each network shows relevant sub-headings: for example, Facebook lets you choose between News Feed, Status Updates, Photos, Wall & Friends.

You can choose the background of your home page from several themes.

Your Dashboard

You pick and choose widgets to create your personalized dashboard. The dashboard is organized with tabs at the top, so you can create multiple tabs for different areas of interest. Clicking Add Widgets opens up a gallery of widgets that you can drag and drop to any tab on your dashboard. Widgets that need access to your login or profile need to be customized from the Options button on that widget.

The widget gallery is quite impressive – some of the popular types include:

• Social Tools – Email, Social Networks, Photo-sharing, etc.
• News Feeds – CNN, New York Times, etc.
• Entertainment – Last.fm, iTunes Media

You can see the list of widgets available in Zooloo here. From within your dashboard, you can listen to podcasts and watch videos without leaving your site. You can rearrange widgets with drag and drop and customize the theme. Your dashboard is private, so nobody else sees it at any time.

Build Your Zooloo Website

With a free Zooloo account, you get a yourname.zooloo.com website for free. Your website includes profile, photo, video, graffiti, blog, and three custom pages. With a $30 annual subscription for Zooloo Plus, you can use it with your own domain name and some extras.

The zCreator website builder is very easy to use. You can choose from different layouts and themes for your website. You add content placeholders by drag and drop and fill them with the text and images to build your website.

Each page of your website is private by default. You can choose to share individual pages, photo albums, and videos publicly, or with specific friends on Zooloo. The privacy settings are easy to use and offer granular control over who sees what on your website.

Blogging and Graffiti

Zooloo also offers a simple interface to add a blog to your website. The blogging service supports categories, comments, and photos/videos. You can also import your blog from Blogger.

Graffiti is Zooloo’s social bookmarking or clipping service. Using a bookmarklet from any browser, you can quickly clip a link, photo, or video on your Graffiti page. Graffiti posts also have comments so you can comment on your friends Graffiti items.

More About Zooloo

Zooloo is an easy-to-use, attractive option for non-geeks to have their own website and a central place for social networking and infotainment. The owners of the site say that they are not competing with established social networks like Facebook, but complementing them. There are already over 20,000 users of Zooloo from each state in the US and 76 countries. Users are buying from within their shopping malls inside Zooloo using PayPal. There are plans for an iPhone application as well.

Will you try out Zooloo or recommend it to someone? Do you prefer any other free website/dashboard service? Let us know in the comments!