That's all well and good until people start wanting more power over the development. It would be nice if these projects that started out with a clear goal and intentions stayed this way.
The unfortunate truth is CMS's are ten a penny these days and to knock the big boys off is near impossible
Yes it looks good, yes it looks promising but yes there are 100's of CMS's already built out there that do this exact job.
Good luck with the endeavour but I think you are about 5 years too late
Thanks for your feedback! Our unique value proposition is that designers can build custom site templates quickly, without coding. Most existing solutions (Weebly for example) require coding html / css templates for implementing custom site design. Our target market are designers who don't have a lot of coding skills or those who don't want to deal with coding for smaller projects.
Yes. We did a lot of client web development work (Pinegrow evolved from there) and we often work with designers who need us to turn their designs into a functional site. Many designers are not coders and have no interest in dealing with nuances of html, css and javascript. They are very interested in Pinegrow as a development tool, backed up by good technical customer support.
There was a drag and drop product released a few years ago that did just this. I can't remember the name of it now and it's dropped off the face of the planet.
My point really was that people will always want more, more power over what they can do and it's quite easy to lose scope and start putting more power into the solution.
We developed our own CMS at our company, it's not for outside world usage but for internal so it's not that I am adverse to the development of them. If I was a company though, I see no issue in downloading Wordpress and buying a template. You get the added knowledge that you can get 1000's of widgets and you can virtually drop them anywhere onto the design of your choice.
I sincerely do wish the develops all the best in such a competitive market and hope that the niche they offer hits off with designers.
The demo is impressive. I guess many people would be interested in this. I would pitch it on Forrst and Dribble where a lot of designers hang out.
From the demo I see that most dimensions are determined the wysiwyg way. Can you serve different resolutions like those used by smartphones, tablets, PCs/Macs and printers and are the layouts fluid?
Yes, fluid designs are possible. We are also working on option to specify media based rules for individual elements including serving different image resolutions to different devices. The main idea is to have one set of content that is then published in appropriate form to individual publishing channels.
Great to hear. People will like it. Non-fluid designs and missing media support are what I hear most when talking about CMS'es. There will always be different levels of site building in the future and your product fits in between them:
- Simple page builders
- Engines with prebuilt themes
- Engines with custom themes
- Your Pinegrow
- Designed PSDs converted into themes
- Individually programmed sites using frameworks
- Totally custom built sites
First thing that struck me was professional designers probably wouldn't use this, they're likely not willing to give up complete design control to a wysiwyg tool, and most have preferred cms and tools.
So with that said, seems the best target is hobbyists, casuals, or people like small business owners who want to save a buck by trying to make their own site (I know several small business owners who have rolled their own site with dreamweaver, for example)
I'd love to see it with a landing video that talks about the problem it solves for people with no experience, rather than using terms like "standards compliant", "hosting platform", etc.
In addition to DIY market we also have those designers who until now had to hire a programmer to turn their designs into a functional website (with cms or without). Thanks for the landing video suggestion!
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 60.8 ms ] threadThe unfortunate truth is CMS's are ten a penny these days and to knock the big boys off is near impossible
Yes it looks good, yes it looks promising but yes there are 100's of CMS's already built out there that do this exact job.
Good luck with the endeavour but I think you are about 5 years too late
My point really was that people will always want more, more power over what they can do and it's quite easy to lose scope and start putting more power into the solution.
We developed our own CMS at our company, it's not for outside world usage but for internal so it's not that I am adverse to the development of them. If I was a company though, I see no issue in downloading Wordpress and buying a template. You get the added knowledge that you can get 1000's of widgets and you can virtually drop them anywhere onto the design of your choice.
I sincerely do wish the develops all the best in such a competitive market and hope that the niche they offer hits off with designers.
I'll i'm saying is, don't lose scope.
I do love a good keyboard warrior
From the demo I see that most dimensions are determined the wysiwyg way. Can you serve different resolutions like those used by smartphones, tablets, PCs/Macs and printers and are the layouts fluid?
So with that said, seems the best target is hobbyists, casuals, or people like small business owners who want to save a buck by trying to make their own site (I know several small business owners who have rolled their own site with dreamweaver, for example)
I'd love to see it with a landing video that talks about the problem it solves for people with no experience, rather than using terms like "standards compliant", "hosting platform", etc.
Forgot to mention: Looks like a great piece of tech and a great product. Can't wait to see where it goes after launch :D