Sampa builds family sites fast

By Rafe Needleman – April 2, 2008 10:00 AM PDT

If you are looking for a quick way to build a Web site for your family or to share news about a new baby with your relatives, you could do worse than to look at Sampa, which launches its version 2 service today.

Originally a general-purpose site-building tool, the service is now focused on family Web sites and has some new features that serve this mission well. However, this release is also missing a few features, so my recommendation for the product is not as strong as it could be.

Yes, we are very proud.

Building a site from scratch with Sampa is easy enough, if not especially fun. The site gives you several decent templates to chose from and lets you easily create blog posts for family events. You can also create separate standalone pages. I found some of the item-creation and editing screens busy and unattractive, though. This is not the site I'd point my grandmother at and expect her to have a good experience.

Not an inviting photo upload function.

My biggest issue with Sampa is how it handles photos--arguably the most important function type when you're building a family site. Sampa 2.0 does not have a good uploader. You have to locate each of your photos individually, and even then can only upload five at a time before you have to clear the Web form and start over. Apparently the previous version of Sampa had a drag-and-drop uploader app, but it is still being retooled for version 2. You can, though, attach a Flickr account to a Sampa site, to give users easy access to photos that might already be online.

There does not appear to be a video-handling function.

On the plus side, there are features in Sampa that are just great for creating attractive Web sites with limited access from outsiders. Inviting people in to a site is very easy, yet still more secure that most blogs. Users don't have to register or set their own passwords--they just follow the invitation link that's sent them. The links are unique to each user.

There's also a MyBlogLog-like feature on the site, so your visitors can see who else is looking at pages. That makes perfect sense for a small community site.

I'm less thrilled with the family tree maker feature on Sampa. It's clever to have that on the site, but the function is not best-of-breed. Partnering with Ancestry or Geni probably would have given the user a better experience.

This is a good service for building a family site. The old-school authoring interface and the lack of strong photo handling features keep it from being great.