6 ms·

Show HN: Autogenerate Visual Sitemaps+Screenshots of any Public or Private Site

39 points by artur_makly 7y ago

artur_makly 7y ago
I’m Artur, and along with my co-founder Luciano, I wanted to share with you the platform we’ve been working on for the past 2 years: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com VisualSitemaps is a SaaS cloud platform that autogenerates visual sitemaps + high-resolution screenshots of any public or private website. With VisualSitemaps, performing in-depth website audits and planning UI, UX, SEO, and marketing research will now take 1/100th of the time at a fraction of the cost. As a product designer, every time I had a new web-based project I kept having to manually create a visual sitemap for myself and my clients to get an idea of its scope, structure, and content. Then I had to take screenshots of key pages to use later as a reference, in proposals, wikis, and in long threaded convos with my clients. I looked for an automated solution that would marry the crawling power of SEO tools with delicate design output my clients were accustomed to expecting. Sadly nothing even came close to what I needed. I was eager to explore what was possible, and with my good friend Luciano emerging from leading the early engineering team at RING (which went on to a $1B exit), things began to get real fast! After conducting one-on-one interviews with over 100 agency folks and web colleagues, we confirmed that I wasn't the only one with this problem. In fact, over many conversations, we realized this is a problem facing UX & UI designers, marketers, strategists, and developers, which opened our eyes to a plethora of possible uses for the platform beyond our original scope and made us envision many other strong use-cases. Our Journey So Far We’ve only been public for about 2 months and have been overwhelmed by the response by early adopters. What makes this particular startup so pleasurable for us is the sheer quality of feedback and ideas from our highly experienced end-users, who are the best and brightest in a very fast-moving industry. It’s almost like the product is making itself… and that’s the great news. Our challenge today (being only a 3-person bootstrapped team) is we still have a TON of work to do to meet the market’s high expectations and needs...but we’re inspired every day by the gorgeous maps we’ve seen created by thousands of users all over the world. One of our proudest accomplishments is our ability to crawl (almost any) password-protected site, which has proven to be very useful for staging sites and user-dashboard flows. It’s not perfect.. and we have some ideas to cover more unique edge-cases, like using cookies and a browser plugin strategy. So please give us a free spin and if you have any questions, ideas, or feedback, let it rip! Thank you! Artur & Luciano (hello@visualsitemaps.com)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
marcussegal 7y ago
Great tool!
andywerner 7y ago
Very cool!
sushi 7y ago
Congrats on shipping it! I'm already using this for my client projects at https://uxready.com https://uxready.com and it helped me find some errors and design inconsistencies when I clicked quickly through the screenshots. Very useful! Really looking forward to your next releases. Thanks for building this!
- artur_makly 7y ago
  very happy to hear that! thank you.
lucidcircusllc 7y ago
how do you handle the private crawling?
- lucianogp 7y ago
  Today we require a set of credentials along with the login URL. We take the security very seriously and we made sure that these values travel and are stored encrypted; also, once the crawl is complete we redact the username and password provided. While this solution works for most sites out of the box, we also added flexibility to this procedure: we support custom CSS selectors, two-step forms (i.e. enter username, hit next, then enter password and hit `sign in`) and forms inside modals that have to be revealed. From our own tests and from our users so far we feel we cover most regular login scenarios. However, there are more cases that we want to cover in the future. For example two-factor authentication scenarios. One alternative that we've discussed for our next iteration is providing a browser plugin so you can "grab" the session data and send it to us so we can reuse it. That way there are no credentials being shared and we'd also get the benefit of getting more complex login systems to work :) This has been one of the most difficult features that look easy on paper but then get more complicated as you work on them, so feedback and ideas are more than welcomed!
rodrigopavano 7y ago
Very cool! I can't believe no one built this before. I'll give it a try.
kflynn90 7y ago
Nice product guys
artur_makly 7y ago
{UPDATE} 1- We have a freemium model *50-pages/month 2- We just removed the Email Confirmation().. so you can just use any email (for now..to try us out faster). Or just check out these demos: (Public) Xapo.com - https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/7b4fd8556b102ed739cc308efdf78c9f https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/7b4fd8556b102ed739cc308... NYTimes.com - https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/325c026c9e9c8125cb05a481be392983 https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/325c026c9e9c8125cb05a48... (Private) Calendly’s Dashboard https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/aa8c0d228e52aa867247dc39e31a01bc https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/aa8c0d228e52aa867247dc3...
hernanborre 7y ago
Really nice app and a hardworking team that I know first-hand! Best of lucks!
AntoineY 7y ago
Awesome app and a big need in the UX world, glad someone is trying to fix that gap.
martinfrankel 7y ago
Congratulations guys, super product! Glad you brought it to life.
benjamineevans 7y ago
Hella useful app from a talented team! Congrats !!
dmnyc 7y ago
Great product, easy to use!

39 points by artur_makly 7y ago

I’m Artur, and along with my co-founder Luciano, I wanted to share with you the platform we’ve been working on for the past 2 years: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com VisualSitemaps is a SaaS cloud platform that autogenerates visual sitemaps + high-resolution screenshots of any public or private website. With VisualSitemaps, performing in-depth website audits and planning UI, UX, SEO, and marketing research will now take 1/100th of the time at a fraction of the cost. As a product designer, every time I had a new web-based project I kept having to manually create a visual sitemap for myself and my clients to get an idea of its scope, structure, and content. Then I had to take screenshots of key pages to use later as a reference, in proposals, wikis, and in long threaded convos with my clients. I looked for an automated solution that would marry the crawling power of SEO tools with delicate design output my clients were accustomed to expecting. Sadly nothing even came close to what I needed. I was eager to explore what was possible, and with my good friend Luciano emerging from leading the early engineering team at RING (which went on to a $1B exit), things began to get real fast! After conducting one-on-one interviews with over 100 agency folks and web colleagues, we confirmed that I wasn't the only one with this problem. In fact, over many conversations, we realized this is a problem facing UX & UI designers, marketers, strategists, and developers, which opened our eyes to a plethora of possible uses for the platform beyond our original scope and made us envision many other strong use-cases. Our Journey So Far We’ve only been public for about 2 months and have been overwhelmed by the response by early adopters. What makes this particular startup so pleasurable for us is the sheer quality of feedback and ideas from our highly experienced end-users, who are the best and brightest in a very fast-moving industry. It’s almost like the product is making itself… and that’s the great news. Our challenge today (being only a 3-person bootstrapped team) is we still have a TON of work to do to meet the market’s high expectations and needs...but we’re inspired every day by the gorgeous maps we’ve seen created by thousands of users all over the world. One of our proudest accomplishments is our ability to crawl (almost any) password-protected site, which has proven to be very useful for staging sites and user-dashboard flows. It’s not perfect.. and we have some ideas to cover more unique edge-cases, like using cookies and a browser plugin strategy. So please give us a free spin and if you have any questions, ideas, or feedback, let it rip! Thank you! Artur & Luciano (hello@visualsitemaps.com)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

marcussegal 7y ago

Great tool!

andywerner 7y ago

Very cool!

sushi 7y ago

Congrats on shipping it! I'm already using this for my client projects at https://uxready.com https://uxready.com and it helped me find some errors and design inconsistencies when I clicked quickly through the screenshots. Very useful! Really looking forward to your next releases. Thanks for building this!

artur_makly 7y ago
very happy to hear that! thank you.

lucidcircusllc 7y ago

how do you handle the private crawling?

lucianogp 7y ago
Today we require a set of credentials along with the login URL. We take the security very seriously and we made sure that these values travel and are stored encrypted; also, once the crawl is complete we redact the username and password provided. While this solution works for most sites out of the box, we also added flexibility to this procedure: we support custom CSS selectors, two-step forms (i.e. enter username, hit next, then enter password and hit `sign in`) and forms inside modals that have to be revealed. From our own tests and from our users so far we feel we cover most regular login scenarios. However, there are more cases that we want to cover in the future. For example two-factor authentication scenarios. One alternative that we've discussed for our next iteration is providing a browser plugin so you can "grab" the session data and send it to us so we can reuse it. That way there are no credentials being shared and we'd also get the benefit of getting more complex login systems to work :) This has been one of the most difficult features that look easy on paper but then get more complicated as you work on them, so feedback and ideas are more than welcomed!

rodrigopavano 7y ago

Very cool! I can't believe no one built this before. I'll give it a try.

kflynn90 7y ago

Nice product guys

artur_makly 7y ago

{UPDATE} 1- We have a freemium model *50-pages/month 2- We just removed the Email Confirmation().. so you can just use any email (for now..to try us out faster). Or just check out these demos: (Public) Xapo.com - https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/7b4fd8556b102ed739cc308efdf78c9f https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/7b4fd8556b102ed739cc308... NYTimes.com - https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/325c026c9e9c8125cb05a481be392983 https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/325c026c9e9c8125cb05a48... (Private) Calendly’s Dashboard https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/aa8c0d228e52aa867247dc39e31a01bc https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/aa8c0d228e52aa867247dc3...

hernanborre 7y ago

Really nice app and a hardworking team that I know first-hand! Best of lucks!

AntoineY 7y ago

Awesome app and a big need in the UX world, glad someone is trying to fix that gap.

martinfrankel 7y ago

Congratulations guys, super product! Glad you brought it to life.

benjamineevans 7y ago

Hella useful app from a talented team! Congrats !!

dmnyc 7y ago

Great product, easy to use!