4 ms·

Wow, this is pretty huge. There's a big gap between designers and developers particularly in the smb market. Youll have designers that don't know how to develop

Wow, this is pretty huge. There's a big gap between designers and developers particularly in the smb market. Youll have designers that don't know how to develop make brochure-style sites that business owners don't know how to develop. Or you'll have developers make an editable site that looks like crap. If you want both you have to pay a lot of money. For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and manage. This is genius and is going to be very big.

lovskogen 15y ago
Problem is some companies wants to go outside the 'template', and that's where direct manipulation gets really tricky when you got a different customer every month. I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us two options. a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive) b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls when a users clicks a particular part of content.
- bobfunk 15y ago
  You should checkout http://www.webpop.com http://www.webpop.com (disclaimer, I'm the co-founder). We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'. Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep up to date.
  - lovskogen 15y ago
    That's what I meant with b), which is how we do it too. But it's not the best solution, which is direct manipulation – no 'form window' to edit the content of a page. Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different needs for a website.
    - bobfunk 15y ago
      I'm not actually convinced a) is the best solution though. For some things it is, but once you work with structured data that might show up in different places and might be displayed in different ways in those places, it's not always the best. It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes problematic.
      - lovskogen 15y ago
        Yes, but most of the time direct manipulation is king, so I hold that as the best solution.
- drusenko 15y ago
  By the way, the majority of customizations can be made to the template, and you are free to edit all HTML/CSS of the site there. For the remaining customizations, you can either choose to style a Weebly element's CSS, or you can drop in your own code with a "Custom HTML" element.

lovskogen 15y ago

Problem is some companies wants to go outside the 'template', and that's where direct manipulation gets really tricky when you got a different customer every month. I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us two options. a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive) b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls when a users clicks a particular part of content.

bobfunk 15y ago
You should checkout http://www.webpop.com http://www.webpop.com (disclaimer, I'm the co-founder). We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'. Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep up to date.
- lovskogen 15y ago
  That's what I meant with b), which is how we do it too. But it's not the best solution, which is direct manipulation – no 'form window' to edit the content of a page. Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different needs for a website.
  - bobfunk 15y ago
    I'm not actually convinced a) is the best solution though. For some things it is, but once you work with structured data that might show up in different places and might be displayed in different ways in those places, it's not always the best. It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes problematic.
    - lovskogen 15y ago
      Yes, but most of the time direct manipulation is king, so I hold that as the best solution.
drusenko 15y ago
By the way, the majority of customizations can be made to the template, and you are free to edit all HTML/CSS of the site there. For the remaining customizations, you can either choose to style a Weebly element's CSS, or you can drop in your own code with a "Custom HTML" element.