OREANDA-NEWS. June 10, 2009. Yandex updates its free web hosting service Narod.ru. The Builder – a multi-tool for creating websites – has been rolled out for beta testing on the service. This tool allows users to create state-of-the-art web resources and publish them using a third level domain name (acme.narod.ru), or a personal domain name (acme.ru).

The Builder creates the entire website layout including overall design, menu and other elements. Users can choose website’s layout and style depending on its function, and also select objects that will appear on a page, such as text, images, photo gallery, widgets etc.

The new tool is handy for making as personal websites, so company resources. Together with a chance to use a personal domain name, the Builder gives customers an opportunity to develop an online presence, with the address worthy of a business card of a large company CEO.

"Our customers can still use the old website tool Workshop to make and edit websites, and all resources already hosted on Narod will remain intact,” assures head of the service, Olga Ivanova. “In the future, these websites will be transferred to the new platform and their owners will be able to do the editing using the Builder’s toolkit. While our new tool is in the test phase, we are very eager to receive customer feedback, so that the product we would offer as the end result was as user-friendly as possible.”

Yandex.Narod was launched in 2000 and in the following nice years it has grown to become the largest free web hosting service in Russia. Currently, the service hosts about 1.5m websites.