I hate making a new login that I have to remember for things I might not even use. It would be nice if you could create the website first, then only sign up if you liked it and wanted to save it. This stops me from testing cool looking projects like this all the time :(
EDIT: that being said, I love that you can edit the landing page itself, that at least gives me some idea of how it works, although then if I turn it into something interesting I have to start over when I sign up.
So I think this is an excellent point. I'd love to do something like that for my product as well.
However, there are a few considerations, some of bigger consequence than others:
- How do you keep users from losing their data when they leave and come back? Cookies with an ID are a brittle solution. You could have a unique link, where the user's work is saved right up until they want to register
- How do you deal with the inevitable onslaught of people using an open system? If you're bootstrapping like me, I don't think I could possibly handle the influx of an HN frontpage's worth of people simultaneously hammering the system
- When do you clean house? You won't necessarily know whether someone wants to build a site, disappear for a month and then come back to it. Feels unlikely, but it's still possible.
All of this would be solved by having (at the very least) a quick email-only signup, which auto-generates a password and a welcome email, but also takes you straight into the system. It's a small barrier to entry, but perhaps one that's worth putting in place to avoid hammering the server(s) too much?
What do you think of video content showing off the system, could that help as a sort of interim solution?
You could require a login after someone has added at least 5 objects and/or spent at least 5 minutes making edits. This makes sure that if data is lost, it's nothing that can't be easily recreated.
After at least 30 seconds of activity, you can display a prominent banner at the top of the page that says "make a free account to ensure your work is saved". Then it's clear that your ability to retrieve their data upon their next visit is a favor and not something they're obligated to. It's not exactly the same, but you can look at CoderPad's sandbox notice as inspiration for how to word this: https://app.coderpad.io/launch-sandbox (Note: you'll only be able to make one sandbox per cookie, so visit this in incognito mode)
To address scaling, you can probably limit the total number of "logged-out users" who are currently editing. If more users visit the site during the same time period, require them to make an account, just like you are now. If you're worried about users expecting a playground and getting confused, you can look at Google Docs's "This is getting a lot of traffic, you're in read only mode" notice that appears when more than 50 people are visiting a doc as an example of how explain the situation in an easily understandable way.
Now that you've properly set user expectations, you can clean house whenever and it should be okay.
btw, I just tried out this tool and I think it's awesome for a lot of the reasons mentioned in the top replies. Hope some of this is helpful + wishing you best of luck!
I never watch videos personally, but that's more because most of them are terrible and don't help than anything (they either just talk about it and never show the actual product, or take 5 minutes introducing themselves before the 1 minute demo, etc.). I'm sure it could be done right though, but I'd bet other people have also been trained not to click videos.
The email gate sounds good (except don't generate a password that will then be visible in plain text, generate a one-time login that can't be reused after a certain amount of time and give the user the option to set a password later if they want one); sites could expire after a bit and a real account (where the site doesn't expire) could only be created if/when the user chooses to create a password and you can't save or use features that could trigger emails until you've verified your email or something.
Serializing the user's session state to LocalStorage comes to mind as a reasonable solution. Comes with it's own caveats, of course (you now have a state versioning problem), but addresses all the points you bring up pretty adequately:
1. As long as their on the same device/browser, they lose zero data. This is a pretty reliable happy-path use case.
2. The only onslaught you'll deal with is simple pageviews since everything in the trial is stored client side, which also makes #3 no problem.
- Instagram has recently become much more aggressive in not showing anything to logged out users. Because of this, when you create a button (on your site) linking to an Instagram page, the button name ends up being "Login • Instagram" (that's because you're getting the Open Graph preview of the page you're redirected to, i.e. the login..!)
You could probably have an exception for Instagram and when linking to instagram.com/<username>, force the button name to be @<username>. Not ideal, certainly, but maybe a bit better?
Congrats again and happy launch!
EDIT: I initially didn't see that the mobile viewport /is/ visible when designing on desktop! my bad! I removed my original note
> Websites shouldn't all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.
I really like the design aesthethic this product encourages. There's so much charm and fun and eccentricity that's lost in a web where full-height responsive image backgrounds and blocky design frameworks are ubiquitous.
If this can help people express just a little bit of the wild creativity of things like early 2000's MySpace layouts or GeoCities pages I'll be a big fan!
I think now that many live in a youtube/twitter/twitch/facebook/insta sandbox where you can't customize your "space" very much, those days of people crafting their own corner of the internet is really gone.
I don't know, on the other hand, "random" is kind of a tired aesthetic.
Little inspires less confidence about someone's creativity than schizophrenic jumbles of gifs.
Besides, there wasn't a reduction in fun and eccentricity. So lets permit for a second that being "random" and being fun and eccentric are the same thing (they're not). Part of fun and eccentric moved to video games, the real safe space on the Internet for it. Part of it went away because personal websites became public facing destinations in a way MySpace and Geocities pages never really were.
And before you say that MySpace was a public facing destination, it is proving my point that musicians rapidly moved away from it long before Spotify homogenized the way we access music - it wasn't a music industry thing. It's that Instagram does a better job at doing what MySpace did, and it's because non-random people just communicate with pictures of themselves, particularly their bodies, as the lowest common denominator.
Why is the loss of "wild creativity" no real great loss? Ultimately we can appreciate how hard it is to design nice looking stuff a lot more. Even nostalgia for that old Internet you're talking about is kind of toxic, especially to people who are genuinely random, because nostalgia is a huge obstacle to getting people to try new things. And that's why maybe those blocky design frameworks are here to stay - because stuff that feels visually familiar on something that doesn't really matter, like a website, convinces the visitor to try something new that does matter - whatever you're writing, composing, making, etc. that you're putting on the web in the first place.
> I don't know, on the other hand, "random" is kind of a tired aesthetic.
In graphic design (as I learnt it 20 years ago) there's broadly two categories, stable and dynamic. A stable design follows the rules, has quite a logical structure, and even a dilettante can easily use templates to make one without even understanding the rules all that well.
OTOH, to execute a dynamic design well you need to have a strong intuition for aesthetics, as well as a deep understanding of the rules. My teacher put it more plainly, you need to understand the rules to break them properly - otherwise it just looks like you screwed up.
The tool provides full freedom to break the rules, it doesn't mean everyone will break them well, but it does open more possibilities for a capable designer. And if there's anything tired, it's the same-y stable designs that cover almost the entirety of the web.
Seeing websites as just being a tool to get you to the thing “that does matter” is a shame. There’s a place for that for sure, but that’s all the modern web is now. I miss the time when the site itself was an expression of the person who made it.
Was a website in the mid 00's where you could build your own website (anameofyourchoosing.piczo.com) and then decorate it using a WYSIWYG editor via drag and drop. Was really popular with kids when I was in primary school (including myself).
There were no templates or any grid systems etc, you'd start with a totally blank white page and you'd just add different premade widgets or HTML snippets to the page, customise the background etc. etc.
Made for some interesting designs to say the least. You'd have to be pretty good at it to make anything that looked professional due to the impreciseness of it all though.
Shame there doesn't seem to be really much archived of the service or any of the sites, unlike Geocities. You can see some examples of sites if you look on Google Images though.
"There's so much charm and fun and eccentricity that's lost in a web where full-height responsive image backgrounds and blocky design frameworks are ubiquitous."
This reminds me of this web design "meme" from 2016: Which one of the two possible websites are you currently designing?
I miss a 'Jump to random mmm.page'. No time or creativity to add something myself, but I'd like to get a few impressions on the jumbly messy things that are being made..
Great idea, would be good to see what users have created. It shouldn't be totally random though, as that could just go to a bunch of incomplete sites. It should be curated a little bit.
I would rather pay $79 USD a month for this than what I get with leadpages that I mostly use for easy editing/creation. One click editing was awesome right on the homepage. Love this and can imagine using it for a number of quick things.
If I were leadpages or a similar company I'd buy this outright right now before y'all build up your own community and the price reflects that.
If you're thinking of a model I'd suggest doing pay per export for source code/external host, let people build & then export full css/html/etc for like $9 a project. Keep the hosted on your domain free or mostly free and you'll make an industry of people who will justify the small project cost for the time savings of a true drag & drop editor
This is going to get some love. Its the right product insight(even the simplest template driven sites are too hard once you get past the basics). You're working off a good consumer insight ("i want this site to look very different"). I like the details (chaos monkey). Super simple to understand and use.
I wish the "edit" button was more visible. I noticed it only on my second visit. After I found it, I enjoyed playing with the page and the first hand experience a lot more than reading about it. During my first visit I wasn't impressed but now the product looks cool to me.
I was about to say the same. Make it bigger. Make it pulse. Mention high up in the text.... Or something. I scanned through the page and was annoyed there didn't seem to be a way of testing it without signing up and was about to leave when I spotted the edit button.
Readit News
EDIT: that being said, I love that you can edit the landing page itself, that at least gives me some idea of how it works, although then if I turn it into something interesting I have to start over when I sign up.
However, there are a few considerations, some of bigger consequence than others:
- How do you keep users from losing their data when they leave and come back? Cookies with an ID are a brittle solution. You could have a unique link, where the user's work is saved right up until they want to register
- How do you deal with the inevitable onslaught of people using an open system? If you're bootstrapping like me, I don't think I could possibly handle the influx of an HN frontpage's worth of people simultaneously hammering the system
- When do you clean house? You won't necessarily know whether someone wants to build a site, disappear for a month and then come back to it. Feels unlikely, but it's still possible.
All of this would be solved by having (at the very least) a quick email-only signup, which auto-generates a password and a welcome email, but also takes you straight into the system. It's a small barrier to entry, but perhaps one that's worth putting in place to avoid hammering the server(s) too much?
What do you think of video content showing off the system, could that help as a sort of interim solution?
After at least 30 seconds of activity, you can display a prominent banner at the top of the page that says "make a free account to ensure your work is saved". Then it's clear that your ability to retrieve their data upon their next visit is a favor and not something they're obligated to. It's not exactly the same, but you can look at CoderPad's sandbox notice as inspiration for how to word this: https://app.coderpad.io/launch-sandbox (Note: you'll only be able to make one sandbox per cookie, so visit this in incognito mode)
To address scaling, you can probably limit the total number of "logged-out users" who are currently editing. If more users visit the site during the same time period, require them to make an account, just like you are now. If you're worried about users expecting a playground and getting confused, you can look at Google Docs's "This is getting a lot of traffic, you're in read only mode" notice that appears when more than 50 people are visiting a doc as an example of how explain the situation in an easily understandable way.
Now that you've properly set user expectations, you can clean house whenever and it should be okay.
btw, I just tried out this tool and I think it's awesome for a lot of the reasons mentioned in the top replies. Hope some of this is helpful + wishing you best of luck!
The email gate sounds good (except don't generate a password that will then be visible in plain text, generate a one-time login that can't be reused after a certain amount of time and give the user the option to set a password later if they want one); sites could expire after a bit and a real account (where the site doesn't expire) could only be created if/when the user chooses to create a password and you can't save or use features that could trigger emails until you've verified your email or something.
1. As long as their on the same device/browser, they lose zero data. This is a pretty reliable happy-path use case.
2. The only onslaught you'll deal with is simple pageviews since everything in the trial is stored client side, which also makes #3 no problem.
Agree on onboarding.
You also have to re-enter your email after you click your email link which was annoying.
But... this is 100% nitpicking. I think they crushed launch at making this appealing.
I didn't even notice that! What a cool idea to be able to test out the site by editing the home page itself
Deleted Comment
A small comment:
- Instagram has recently become much more aggressive in not showing anything to logged out users. Because of this, when you create a button (on your site) linking to an Instagram page, the button name ends up being "Login • Instagram" (that's because you're getting the Open Graph preview of the page you're redirected to, i.e. the login..!)
You could probably have an exception for Instagram and when linking to instagram.com/<username>, force the button name to be @<username>. Not ideal, certainly, but maybe a bit better?
Congrats again and happy launch!
EDIT: I initially didn't see that the mobile viewport /is/ visible when designing on desktop! my bad! I removed my original note
I really like the design aesthethic this product encourages. There's so much charm and fun and eccentricity that's lost in a web where full-height responsive image backgrounds and blocky design frameworks are ubiquitous.
If this can help people express just a little bit of the wild creativity of things like early 2000's MySpace layouts or GeoCities pages I'll be a big fan!
Little inspires less confidence about someone's creativity than schizophrenic jumbles of gifs.
Besides, there wasn't a reduction in fun and eccentricity. So lets permit for a second that being "random" and being fun and eccentric are the same thing (they're not). Part of fun and eccentric moved to video games, the real safe space on the Internet for it. Part of it went away because personal websites became public facing destinations in a way MySpace and Geocities pages never really were.
And before you say that MySpace was a public facing destination, it is proving my point that musicians rapidly moved away from it long before Spotify homogenized the way we access music - it wasn't a music industry thing. It's that Instagram does a better job at doing what MySpace did, and it's because non-random people just communicate with pictures of themselves, particularly their bodies, as the lowest common denominator.
Why is the loss of "wild creativity" no real great loss? Ultimately we can appreciate how hard it is to design nice looking stuff a lot more. Even nostalgia for that old Internet you're talking about is kind of toxic, especially to people who are genuinely random, because nostalgia is a huge obstacle to getting people to try new things. And that's why maybe those blocky design frameworks are here to stay - because stuff that feels visually familiar on something that doesn't really matter, like a website, convinces the visitor to try something new that does matter - whatever you're writing, composing, making, etc. that you're putting on the web in the first place.
In graphic design (as I learnt it 20 years ago) there's broadly two categories, stable and dynamic. A stable design follows the rules, has quite a logical structure, and even a dilettante can easily use templates to make one without even understanding the rules all that well.
OTOH, to execute a dynamic design well you need to have a strong intuition for aesthetics, as well as a deep understanding of the rules. My teacher put it more plainly, you need to understand the rules to break them properly - otherwise it just looks like you screwed up.
The tool provides full freedom to break the rules, it doesn't mean everyone will break them well, but it does open more possibilities for a capable designer. And if there's anything tired, it's the same-y stable designs that cover almost the entirety of the web.
Edit: changed quote
Was a website in the mid 00's where you could build your own website (anameofyourchoosing.piczo.com) and then decorate it using a WYSIWYG editor via drag and drop. Was really popular with kids when I was in primary school (including myself).
There were no templates or any grid systems etc, you'd start with a totally blank white page and you'd just add different premade widgets or HTML snippets to the page, customise the background etc. etc.
Made for some interesting designs to say the least. You'd have to be pretty good at it to make anything that looked professional due to the impreciseness of it all though.
Shame there doesn't seem to be really much archived of the service or any of the sites, unlike Geocities. You can see some examples of sites if you look on Google Images though.
This reminds me of this web design "meme" from 2016: Which one of the two possible websites are you currently designing?
https://twitter.com/jongold/status/694591217523363840
Five years on, and it still holds true today.
https://basecamp.com/
If I were leadpages or a similar company I'd buy this outright right now before y'all build up your own community and the price reflects that.
If you're thinking of a model I'd suggest doing pay per export for source code/external host, let people build & then export full css/html/etc for like $9 a project. Keep the hosted on your domain free or mostly free and you'll make an industry of people who will justify the small project cost for the time savings of a true drag & drop editor
What about View Page Source > mypage.html? I like the idea of paying per project somehow but this particular method seems not strong
Uh... wow.
It mentioned I can "click Edit and try" but it was not clear I can do that immediately at the landing page without registration.
Also do you have planned custom domains?
Great job!