Would this be useful for non-techies?

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slay2k

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Jul 25, 2010
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Some colleagues of mine are working on a tool that lets you build and modify web pages, live in the browser, by dragging and dropping things around. It works on existing pages as well, and is a little like photoshop, but instead of a PSD file you get the actual html/css.

Anyway, since I have some marketing background, I immediately thought of using it for quickly making and editing landing pages and such. I also thought it might be nice for making multiple versions of a page and having the system do A/B split testing for you.

They liked the idea, but wanted to know if people would actually use it. I figured I'd post and see what you guys thought.
 


Err... so you want to let us beta test?

If you let me beta test it, I promise to break your software until your developers break down and cry.
(ask Lord Brar and Seth of uBot fame)

::emp::
 
kblessinggr said:
... guess you've never seen the great number of online "Site Builders" ?
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I've seen a bunch, but none that let you take an existing site and edit it.

Also, all the ones I've seen are either too complicated (e.g Intuit) or not true WYSIWYG.

emp said:
Err... so you want to let us beta test?
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Sure, why not? They're sorting out a few bugs right now, but I should have a link for you to tool around with in a few days.
 
slay2k said:
I've seen a bunch, but none that let you take an existing site and edit it.

Also, all the ones I've seen are either too complicated (e.g Intuit) or not true WYSIWYG.
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Good luck making a system that can understand just bout anyone's style of coding or even broken parsing for that matter. Or how would your system handle a table-based export from dreamweaver? Not like you can just drag stuff around on that.
 
kblessinggr said:
Good luck making a system that can understand just bout anyone's style of coding or even broken parsing for that matter. Or how would your system handle a table-based export from dreamweaver? Not like you can just drag stuff around on that.
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Yeah, valid points, I think all that would be a nightmare. From what I've seen, their software layers on top of the html rather than replacing it. So, they let the browser handle the parsing, then load client-side js that makes everything movable and injects their own editing interface into the DOM.

And of course they still have to decide on how fine-grained things will be, so you'll probably move whole tables around rather than trying to edit the internals.
 
slay2k said:
Yeah, valid points, I think all that would be a nightmare. From what I've seen, their software layers on top of the html rather than replacing it. So, they let the browser handle the parsing, then load client-side js that makes everything movable and injects their own editing interface into the DOM.

And of course they still have to decide on how fine-grained things will be, so you'll probably move whole tables around rather than trying to edit the internals.
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:/ not really editing then, and woild probably be pointless to most of the people here since they get those shitty slice-exports all the time. :p
 
kblessinggr said:
:/ not really editing then, and woild probably be pointless to most of the people here since they get those shitty slice-exports all the time. :p
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What kind of slice-exports ?

And I was thinking it might be useful to those who are less technical. You know, throw up a site or modify the work someone did for you without paying per hour. I know designer/developers have their own tools and workflows.
 
slay2k said:
What kind of slice-exports ?

And I was thinking it might be useful to those who are less technical. You know, throw up a site or modify the work someone did for you without paying per hour. I know designer/developers have their own tools and workflows.
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I'm speaking of clients who may have had a design sliced by a coder, by 'slice-export' I mean they get this table-layout export which by your note wouldn't be editable. If they were technical they'd know the diff :P And I wasn't talking bout designers/coders but rather end-users that'd need to edit what they've been delivered.
 
kblessinggr said:
I'm speaking of clients who may have had a design sliced by a coder, by 'slice-export' I mean they get this table-layout export which by your note wouldn't be editable. If they were technical they'd know the diff :P And I wasn't talking bout designers/coders but rather end-users that'd need to edit what they've been delivered.
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There's no option to export CSS instead of tables ?

Refrozen said:
This software sounds like a nightmare.

Edit: Please see Frontpage's history.
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Frontpage had a market for at least 8 years. Please point me to the history you're referring to ?
 
slay2k said:
They liked the idea, but wanted to know if people would actually use it. I figured I'd post and see what you guys thought.
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Hey Slay2k. With this project, I think it's important to keep the core target in mind. The person you described would be at an introductory level for developing landing pages. I don't think you will find those same people responding to your question on WickedFire.

Many of the WF's users are very experienced marketers and developers. As a result, the market research you're trying to find probably won't be as reliable from this audience versus another, more basic, web forum.
 
You know ben, I think your assessment is spot on the money.

Nonetheless, it's been interesting to hear different points of view.
 
slay2k said:
There's no option to export CSS instead of tables ?
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Well there's a Div/ID option but its essentially the same thing, breaking down the page into cells or blocks rather than layers. So you goto edit or drag something like the logo only to realize its not only merged in with the background but also cut into like 3 pieces because the surrounding boxes were 3 pieces of sliced text zones or fillers.) The export to web option simply takes whatever you have and cuts it up cookie-cutter style.
 
kblessinggr said:
Well there's a Div/ID option but its essentially the same thing, breaking down the page into cells or blocks rather than layers. So you goto edit or drag something like the logo only to realize its not only merged in with the background but also cut into like 3 pieces because the surrounding boxes were 3 pieces of sliced text zones or fillers.) The export to web option simply takes whatever you have and cuts it up cookie-cutter style.
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Sounds annoying, and it doesn't sound like grouping objects would help much. Guess that removes "editing exported slices" from list of useful applications ?
 
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