Introduction

First off, I needed to open an account at www.hotglue.me, where I provided registration details such as username(which turned out to be the prefix of your HOTGLUE url), password and an email address. I had to go through a cheesy CAPTCHA system, showing a set of tools and asking for the right option. Once I was successful, I agreed with the terms of use and registered. I then received an email confirmation link via the email address provided. I clicked the link and was sent off to make my HOTGLUE website!

Initially, I designed my site like this but I wasn't satisfied with it so within seconds...

...I came up with this brand new look, thanks to the editiing style of HOTGLUE.

The "add a new text object" tool comes with functions that allow you to to edit and style text and also has the general functions(left of object)

Video source: www.hotglue.me

the fisrt function group gives users the following basic options (from left to right): add a new text object, upload a file,(downwards) embed another web page and embed a video url from youtube or vimeo.

The second function group can be accessed by triple-clicking on an empty space in the site. In this, you get functions that allow the user do more advanced editing and access to "behind the scenes" attributes of the site such as editing page title, changing the page's url, listing all site pages, creating a new page, adding/editing custom code and access to the grid. It also provides an option to go back to previous site design revisions, which comes in handy when you need to compare your designs.

The second function group contains some more advanced functions such as changing the page title, adding code, viewing the grid, setting the home page and changing the url of the current page.

To access my page, I had to enter my username followed by .hotglue.me. Also, I found out Hotglue is cap sensitive, so one needs to enter the username exactly how it was registered.
To edit a page in hotglue, all I had to do was add /edit/ to the page's url, then I was asked to login with my username and password I chose while registering for the Hotglue site.

I found out Hotglue has two sets of function groups. The first can be accessed by double-clicking on an empty space on the page. This contains basic functions to allow the user get started. They are; add a new text object, upload a file, embed a web page and embed a video url from either YouTube or Vimeo.

Fill in your registration details, paying close attention to your username as this would be the prefix of your site!

Click on the email confirmation sent to you and start creating a site

Type in your username followed by .hotglue.me. Be aware that hotglue is CAP sensitive

To edit any of your HOTGLUE pages, type /edit at the end of the link

According to www.hotglue.me, Hotglue is a content manipulation system. It is a web creating tool that gives it's users the flexiblity to make changes (or manipulate) web sites created on its platform in real time. Hotglue allows its users the ability to quickly create and edit elements and structure, using web browsers. I think it's a great tool for people new to web designing as it allows users to experiment with its interface without the knowledge of HTML, CSS, JAVA, or any coding. Although, if you know coding, you could do some more advance stuff with its add/edit custom code function.

HOTGLUE comes with a range of useful tools to quickly put together a site

Each of these tools come with their unique editing functions. They can be found on the top corner while the object is selected. For example "add a new text object tool" comes with functions that allow you to to edit and style text while the "upload a file" tool has functions for tiling and adjusting the uploaded image. They also have the general functions that can be found in other tools. These are left of the selected object. Some examples of these functions are copy, lock and delete.

I thought HOTGLUE is great because it allows one easily do some editing that are more complicating in code form. For example, you can quickly test color schemes, sketch up site designs; divs, tabs and all in a few minutes. Where as, if you were going to write this in HTML and CSS, it would take longer. However, you lack the precision of working with code. Also with HOTGLUE, you can easily paste images, videos, music and even other sites very quickly.

Hotglue is very limited in its operating style and also limits its user to a handful of functions. You don't have access to its HTML and CSS files, so you can't be precise in structuring or styling. Plus most of the codes you write in its "add/edit code" tool end up being over-ridden by the site's CSS and HTML codes. Another issue is with its HTML elements, whereby they are all static, you cannot make a flexible, adaptive website that re-positions according to page contents.
Due to this, you experience problems in different viewing platforms as your design does not adjust to screen.
Also in terms of font-typeface, it has great limitations as it gives you very few choices to work with.

Despite its shortcoming and limitations, I still find hotglue quite useful in the sense that I can use it's styling structure to design my site. For example, I can quickly sketch up site designs on it, copy the design's source code via "view source code" on browsers, finetune the HTML elements and it's CSS to my taste and save up for my main site. I definitely wouldn't want to use it to create a site but I'd love to use it to simplify cumbersome tasks like CSS styling and testing out site designs before writing codes.