HOTGLUE is an in-browser tool designed to make it intuitive and simple to create visually driven websites. The tool’s developers pride themselves on the simplicity of their user interface and consider themselves a very alternative-alternative to more complicated systems like wordpress or drupal.

We were introduced to HOTGLUE in one of our first Web Design Studio Sessions and were told to try and make a website. Right from the off it was clear that the HOTGLUE toolset is unconventional and fairly individual. There are 4 tools available to create an object (Figure 1). You can upload a file, create a simple text object or embed a webpage or video. This means that HOTGLUE websites are largely composed of just images and text boxes. When you start a website in HOTGLUE you have a blank canvas. By creating objects and placing them in your environment you can start to build a very visual webpage. By clicking on the objects you create you are able to give them properties of appearance and functionality, e.g. a border, background colour or hyperlink to internal and external webpages.

The first site I created in HOTGLUE was a website based on my group of friends. AwesomeFOF was a site I created to showcase any media related to me and my friends. There are 3 pages on the site, the home page links to 2 album pages and has an embedded soundcloud track, and the other two pages are image galleries from specific times in our friendship.

The AFOF site is a much more typical free formed HOTGLUE site to this portfolio site. The philosophy behind this tool is to create scrapbook-like websites that don’t necessarily need to look clean to look good.

Below is an embedded official video introducing HOTGLUE. At the bottom of this page you will find links to more videos and my first HOTGLUE site.

Figure 1

Figure 2

AwesomeFOF HOTGLUE Site: https://awesomefof.hotglue.me/?Home/
HOTGLUE Instructional videos: https://hotglue.me/how

In this page I will talk about the online web development tool HOTGLUE and how it can be used to create websites like this one.