6 ms·

WebStudio: Open visual development for the open web

109 points by nateb2022 3y ago

morgango 3y ago
I downloaded it, looks slick. Can I use standard frameworks like Bootstrap with this? Also, any docs?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  If you're using a design tool to build your website... why would you need bootstrap? If you use a tool, the implementation details shouldn't matter much to you, just the process and final product.
  - morgango 3y ago
    I am just fine with the look and feel of bootstrap. Visual tools are great for prototyping and for dealing with fiddly bits like layouts. Why would I want to be constrained to plain HTML when there are pre-made toolkits out there that do it for me? I don't want to figure out how to do rounded corners in CSS, but I would like to have a GUI that shows me how it looks on a page.
    - singpolyma3 3y ago
      ... you know rounded corners are built in to CSS right? There's no arcane knowledge there. Bit of an odd example
      - mthoms 3y ago
        Reminds me of the old "sliding doors" technique. You young guns have no idea how good you have it with your fandangled "border-radius". We had to work hard for our rounded corners back in the day. https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/ https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/
    - rchaud 3y ago
      It sounds like you'd be better off with a Bootstrap-based visual site builder. I can recommend Bootstrap Studio. The visual nature of it helped me work with flexbox much better than online tutorials did. It exports nicely structured HTML that can be edited and modified outside of BSS easily. It's a paid tool, but there's no vendor lock-in. Buy once and it's yours forever.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Wish that was the case in general, but it isn't. The implementation details matter, because: - There may be other tools better at specific aspects of the product, which you may want to include in the process; - Special case of the above, the design tool may not carry you 100% of the way, and you don't want the tool to become an anchor at that point; - There may be other people working on the product, using different tools; - There is lots of ready-made stuff that can be plugged in to your product to enhance or prettify or optimize it - provided it's compatible with common standards at the implementation level.
    - oleg009 3y ago
      This is true. There are standard use cases like landing/marketing sites, blogs etc that can be done fully visually, and there are custom once where coding is not avoidable. We have designed it to work for both by providing API and CLI to integrate with the custom app and git-based workflow. This part is still work in progress though.
- oleg009 3y ago
  Integrations with various frameworks is on the roadmap. In fact we have already started integrating with the first one - Radix UI. Once we are happy with the API for integration, we will document it for developers community so everyone can integrate it with different frameworks.
joshmarinacci 3y ago
What do they mean by 'Open' if it's a service?
- naavis 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, it is also a desktop application, and the source code is available on Github: https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio-builder https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio-builder On the main website you can scroll down to the bottom and click Download.
- mthoms 3y ago
  It's open source. You can self-host it.
  - pryelluw 3y ago
    Doesn’t say much how. And it mentions docker but doesn’t mention anything about running the docker image.
    - modeless 3y ago
      Good thing you can pay them to take care of those things if you don't want to invest effort in finding out for yourself.
    - nateb2022 3y ago
      Their Contributing guide has a couple sections on getting it up and running: https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/blob/main/docs/contributing.md#builder-installation https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/blob/main/docs/con...
      - pryelluw 3y ago
        I saw that and confused it with a non-containerized install. Thanks for posting.
    - troymc 3y ago
m00x 3y ago
There are so many website builders out there, I'm surprised someone made yet another one. This basically looks like webflow.
- mthoms 3y ago
  According to their blog, the main developer used to work for Webflow. They wanted to start fresh because of some technical debt that Webflow (apparently) has.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  See "Webstudio vs. Webflow" https://webstudio.is/blog/webstudio-vs-webflow https://webstudio.is/blog/webstudio-vs-webflow
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  I, for one, am glad for there to be more than just one good option out there. Alternatives are a good thing, especially self-hostable ones.
28304283409234 3y ago
Ah Dreamweaver. You just won't die, will you.
- stayux 3y ago
  Thanks for posting it:)
- benoliver999 3y ago
  At my school "web design" was creating a document in MS Publisher and clicking export to html
  - joseda-hg 3y ago
    I remember my sister doing "Web Design" for uni 100% in Dream Weaver Their classes we're roughly explaining which magic buttons to press in what order and voila: web design
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Web publishing for individuals shouldn't be anymore complicated than that. Just add a "Publish to SFTP" instead of "Export to HTML" and we'd have a vibrant network of personal websites out there.
    - benoliver999 3y ago
      Yeah but in school I'd just wished they'd taught me html and css. Or even that there was another way of making a website that didn't require the MS Office suite.
- redbell 3y ago
  Ah.. Microsoft FrontPage (especially FrontPage Express), I miss you!
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    I feel Macromedia Fireworks and Macaw is getting summoned.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Solvency 3y ago
So, another Framer.com.
EMM_386 3y ago
I wrote some "CNET 5-star" award winning software (if anyone remember them) and its website back in 1996. HTML/CSS/JS/SQL. CSS/JS were just getting started (CSS 95, JS 96). I did it by hand, but Microsoft FrontPage v1.1 was out that year ... WYSIWYG! 2013 and I'm seeing a proliferation of ... WYSIWYG? Granted, it does look slick and it's MIT licensed. Best of luck with the product.
oleg009 3y ago
Hi, hacker news community. Oleg here, founder of Webstudio. We just launched the Beta a few days ago https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1668519656481497088 https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1668519656481497088 This is basically the first phase - Builder UX. Builder is focused on designers and visual developers. Features developers community would expect are still in development and not documented, but I am excited about any feedback!
danielvaughn 3y ago
I'm gonna start copy/pasting this every time I see a new website builder pop up. Look, at a high level no-code seems to make sense. But there's a serious issue with the value proposition when you start thinking critically about it. The supposed benefit is that, as the "no-code" moniker suggests, people without coding skills can build websites. Sounds great! Except that just, like, look at the screenshot in the hero section webstudio's landing page. There's a visual sidebar with a flexbox configuration panel. The word "flex" is displayed as a dropdown, so I'd imagine that the menu list contains other options like "grid", "block", etc. This means your target audience is people who (a) understand the difference between CSS display properties, and (b) think that this interface is easier and faster than writing the code directly. I genuinely do not understand who this audience is - if you understand code, code is dramatically faster than any UI and everyone who codes knows it. I've worked with a non-technical CEO, and I once showed him Webflow to see if he could grasp it. It went as well as you'd imagine. That's not me making fun of him, it's me pointing out the reality that this shit is complex, and tossing a UI on top of it doesn't change that complexity. Another point is that even if it helps speed up web development, it can only do so for very small websites with light interaction. If you're looking to do anything even remotely custom or sophisticated, these kinds of tools break down very fast. So there's a paradox here - the stuff you can speed up really doesn't take very long anyways, and the stuff you actually need to speed up, these tools don't help with.
- oleg009 3y ago
  There is a serious knowledge gap between what you just wrote and the actual reality out there. I don't want to convince you of anything, just share the knowledge of what's actually happening. Why tools like Webflow have $4bln valuation and why there are millions of webflow developers. 1. You are looking at it in black/white. Coder vs nocoder. That's not how it is in reality. There is a seriously big amount of people who understand enough of coding to use webflow comfortably but not enough to write code by hand and/or wanting to do so. 2. Designers are used to visual tools. They find their way when tool allows to experiment without first studying how to code and then gradually learn css/html basics if they need to. 3. Building layouts, styling, html structure etc is actually faster with webflow once you understand how it works and learn all the shortcuts. If you actually care to learn about it, go talk to some pro webflow devs. Some of them will tell you they actualy know how to code, but its less efficient for a lot of use cases. 4. Handoff. A huge problem with building websites is wasted time between a designer and a developer. There is just too many things to consider and a static design in figma is never complete. Webstudio and Webflow aims at solving or at least reducing the handoff by either building directly in Webstudio/Webflow or by keeping figma design low-fidelity just for initial communication with the customer and then moving on to building. 5. This industry has come a long way and these days several tools are also integrating with git-based developer workflows. The goal is to let designers and visual developers to build visual components and design systems in the builder ui and provide those components to developers for further integration. 6. There is a clearly steep learning curve with Webflow. Lots of things are not easy to get. Its not a tool to build a website in 5 minutes, its a tool to learn html/css visually and become pro visual developer. Once you are there, the typical landing sites and marketing pages, even large one are built significantly faster and more presize from design perspective than with coding. I am saying this as an engineer who started building for the web in 2004. This is not meant to start an argument. Just pointing out a lot of stuff that is understandably not clear to many.
rw2 3y ago
Webflow is so far ahead with CMS and now membership that it'll be hard for open source to catch up unless it moves significantly faster. I think if this product integrates some kind of popular node CMS it might be able to compete. I might be wrong but it just looks like an front end editor similar to GrapeJS
- oleg009 3y ago
  You are correct regarding CMS. Same story with e-commerce and other things. In fact fundamentally the architecture is built around the idea of not having those things built-in but rather providing APIs for others to create integrations with any data source: CMSs, Databases, E-commerce etc. Webflow and others with built-in CMS have a massive amount of problems, because there is no one CMS that fits all. Even harder is e-commerce. So yeah, we are not going to compete on that because we are not building any of it, but instead focusing on architecture to support integrations.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Webflow CMS is expensive, I can see a small business starting out with Webflow and getting locked in. I can't see a more mature business doing this, as they'd want hosting flexibility. WordPress page builders don't have any hosting lock-in.
  - rw2 3y ago
    It is expensive, but it's more expensive to hire a programmer to do similar features on a website. Wordpress is more flexible but it just lack the product polish for consumer or even programmers like myself. If I am building a new product, I'm not going to also try to build a website.
andsoitis 3y ago
> Similar to Webflow, Webstudio visually translates... Wait. So in the first sentence on your homepage you mention your competition. Third word. Before you mention yourself.
- oleg009 3y ago
  Not sure if you are new to the internet :) to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > Not sure if you are new to the internet :) :-) > to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them Supabase headline reads: "Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative for building secure and performant Postgres backends with minimal configuration." Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. There I read at the top: "Firebase is an app development platform that helps you build and grow apps and games users love. Backed by Google and trusted by millions of businesses around the world." And right after there's a "Get Started" button. Since supabase is just an open source alternative (according to their copy) of Firebase (but is it really? it talks about postgres backends not apps?), I'd rather go with the thought leader in this space. Supabase, if you're reading this: what's your elevator pitch? What makes you the leader for building apps or whatever it is you do? Why would I want to follow you?
    - rchaud 3y ago
      > Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. You almost got it :) 95 pct of people arriving on WebStudios' site will be coming from search engines. What search term did they most likely use? Webflow, perhaps? You are confused by the marketing copy because the website link was given to you, you didn't have to think of anything to search for.
sampullman 3y ago
The editor is pretty slick for a beta, but I wonder what the benefit is of releasing an app before, or instead of, a browser version. It seems to be written in react native (?), so I assume it's not a technical reason. (edit: I notice it actually is possible to use the builder in the browser, but that doesn't seem to be advertised anywhere!) One of the problems I've seen with no-code editors is that a small to medium sized site might be contracted out to a developer or agency that builds it with WebFlow. Since the layout and style ends up complex enough that the client can't do much with it themselves, they need to go back to the original contractor, or find someone else who specializes in WebFlow, just to make small changes and bug fixes. Maybe that's fundamentally unsolvable due to the difficulty of producing a complicated site, but it feels like it should be possible to do better. The main criticism I have specifically of this editor is that it feels too similar to WebFlow, but with fewer features, and I can't use it from a browser. The design tokens/local styles might be interesting, but I don't think it's fleshed out enough yet to say whether it's a significant improvement on WebFlow's style selector. I think there's plenty of room to iterate and improve on WYSIWYG builder UX in general though, so I look forward to how the project evolves!
- oleg009 3y ago
  I am confused, we only have a download button at the bottom of the page, but "Get early access" button everywhere else. It is much harder to find download than to open the browser version ... Similarity to Webflow is not a bug, its a feature. It's designed to feel familiar for Webflow developers. This product is built for them. Check out this video to learn how Design Tokens work in Webstudio. It's built with full knowledge of Webflow Style selector. You are talking to an ex style system engineer from Webflow lol. https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1669441600831868944 https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1669441600831868944
  - sampullman 3y ago
    Oh! I probably shouldn't write comments before coffee. What happened was that I saw the sign-up page and assumed it was just for creating an account, rather than accessing the web builder. I should have realized what was going on when the same login screen appeared in the downloaded app. I'm familiar with Webflow and the design tokens make sense to me, but I don't think it's a natural abstraction for non-web developers. I saw that you're ex-Webflow, I just meant to express a general frustration with how existing builders deal with reusable styles - it totally makes sense in the context of targeting devs who already know the Webflow UX. For what it's worth, I've been working on a site builder for the past few months and ended up with a similar solution, so this criticism is partly a projection of my own struggles. Anyway, thanks for replying! The project looks great, I look forward to see what you end up with wrt versioning and animations.
ano88888 3y ago
need a good react component visual builder that produces code you can then customize. You still have code but it speed things up
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  Storybook?
  - solardev 3y ago
    I think that's more of a component documenter than builder, no?
victorbjorklund 3y ago
Down for me. HN-hug of death?

109 points by nateb2022 3y ago

morgango 3y ago

I downloaded it, looks slick. Can I use standard frameworks like Bootstrap with this? Also, any docs?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
If you're using a design tool to build your website... why would you need bootstrap? If you use a tool, the implementation details shouldn't matter much to you, just the process and final product.
- morgango 3y ago
  I am just fine with the look and feel of bootstrap. Visual tools are great for prototyping and for dealing with fiddly bits like layouts. Why would I want to be constrained to plain HTML when there are pre-made toolkits out there that do it for me? I don't want to figure out how to do rounded corners in CSS, but I would like to have a GUI that shows me how it looks on a page.
  - singpolyma3 3y ago
    ... you know rounded corners are built in to CSS right? There's no arcane knowledge there. Bit of an odd example
    - mthoms 3y ago
      Reminds me of the old "sliding doors" technique. You young guns have no idea how good you have it with your fandangled "border-radius". We had to work hard for our rounded corners back in the day. https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/ https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/
  - rchaud 3y ago
    It sounds like you'd be better off with a Bootstrap-based visual site builder. I can recommend Bootstrap Studio. The visual nature of it helped me work with flexbox much better than online tutorials did. It exports nicely structured HTML that can be edited and modified outside of BSS easily. It's a paid tool, but there's no vendor lock-in. Buy once and it's yours forever.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Wish that was the case in general, but it isn't. The implementation details matter, because: - There may be other tools better at specific aspects of the product, which you may want to include in the process; - Special case of the above, the design tool may not carry you 100% of the way, and you don't want the tool to become an anchor at that point; - There may be other people working on the product, using different tools; - There is lots of ready-made stuff that can be plugged in to your product to enhance or prettify or optimize it - provided it's compatible with common standards at the implementation level.
  - oleg009 3y ago
    This is true. There are standard use cases like landing/marketing sites, blogs etc that can be done fully visually, and there are custom once where coding is not avoidable. We have designed it to work for both by providing API and CLI to integrate with the custom app and git-based workflow. This part is still work in progress though.
oleg009 3y ago
Integrations with various frameworks is on the roadmap. In fact we have already started integrating with the first one - Radix UI. Once we are happy with the API for integration, we will document it for developers community so everyone can integrate it with different frameworks.

joshmarinacci 3y ago

What do they mean by 'Open' if it's a service?

naavis 3y ago
As far as I can tell, it is also a desktop application, and the source code is available on Github: https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio-builder https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio-builder On the main website you can scroll down to the bottom and click Download.
mthoms 3y ago
It's open source. You can self-host it.
- pryelluw 3y ago
  Doesn’t say much how. And it mentions docker but doesn’t mention anything about running the docker image.
  - modeless 3y ago
    Good thing you can pay them to take care of those things if you don't want to invest effort in finding out for yourself.
  - nateb2022 3y ago
    Their Contributing guide has a couple sections on getting it up and running: https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/blob/main/docs/contributing.md#builder-installation https://github.com/webstudio-is/webstudio/blob/main/docs/con...
    - pryelluw 3y ago
      I saw that and confused it with a non-containerized install. Thanks for posting.
  - troymc 3y ago

m00x 3y ago

There are so many website builders out there, I'm surprised someone made yet another one. This basically looks like webflow.

mthoms 3y ago
According to their blog, the main developer used to work for Webflow. They wanted to start fresh because of some technical debt that Webflow (apparently) has.
nateb2022 3y ago
See "Webstudio vs. Webflow" https://webstudio.is/blog/webstudio-vs-webflow https://webstudio.is/blog/webstudio-vs-webflow
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
I, for one, am glad for there to be more than just one good option out there. Alternatives are a good thing, especially self-hostable ones.

28304283409234 3y ago

Ah Dreamweaver. You just won't die, will you.

stayux 3y ago
Thanks for posting it:)
benoliver999 3y ago
At my school "web design" was creating a document in MS Publisher and clicking export to html
- joseda-hg 3y ago
  I remember my sister doing "Web Design" for uni 100% in Dream Weaver Their classes we're roughly explaining which magic buttons to press in what order and voila: web design
- rchaud 3y ago
  Web publishing for individuals shouldn't be anymore complicated than that. Just add a "Publish to SFTP" instead of "Export to HTML" and we'd have a vibrant network of personal websites out there.
  - benoliver999 3y ago
    Yeah but in school I'd just wished they'd taught me html and css. Or even that there was another way of making a website that didn't require the MS Office suite.
redbell 3y ago
Ah.. Microsoft FrontPage (especially FrontPage Express), I miss you!
- rzzzt 3y ago
  I feel Macromedia Fireworks and Macaw is getting summoned.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Solvency 3y ago

So, another Framer.com.

EMM_386 3y ago

I wrote some "CNET 5-star" award winning software (if anyone remember them) and its website back in 1996. HTML/CSS/JS/SQL. CSS/JS were just getting started (CSS 95, JS 96). I did it by hand, but Microsoft FrontPage v1.1 was out that year ... WYSIWYG! 2013 and I'm seeing a proliferation of ... WYSIWYG? Granted, it does look slick and it's MIT licensed. Best of luck with the product.

oleg009 3y ago

Hi, hacker news community. Oleg here, founder of Webstudio. We just launched the Beta a few days ago https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1668519656481497088 https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1668519656481497088 This is basically the first phase - Builder UX. Builder is focused on designers and visual developers. Features developers community would expect are still in development and not documented, but I am excited about any feedback!

danielvaughn 3y ago

I'm gonna start copy/pasting this every time I see a new website builder pop up. Look, at a high level no-code seems to make sense. But there's a serious issue with the value proposition when you start thinking critically about it. The supposed benefit is that, as the "no-code" moniker suggests, people without coding skills can build websites. Sounds great! Except that just, like, look at the screenshot in the hero section webstudio's landing page. There's a visual sidebar with a flexbox configuration panel. The word "flex" is displayed as a dropdown, so I'd imagine that the menu list contains other options like "grid", "block", etc. This means your target audience is people who (a) understand the difference between CSS display properties, and (b) think that this interface is easier and faster than writing the code directly. I genuinely do not understand who this audience is - if you understand code, code is dramatically faster than any UI and everyone who codes knows it. I've worked with a non-technical CEO, and I once showed him Webflow to see if he could grasp it. It went as well as you'd imagine. That's not me making fun of him, it's me pointing out the reality that this shit is complex, and tossing a UI on top of it doesn't change that complexity. Another point is that even if it helps speed up web development, it can only do so for very small websites with light interaction. If you're looking to do anything even remotely custom or sophisticated, these kinds of tools break down very fast. So there's a paradox here - the stuff you can speed up really doesn't take very long anyways, and the stuff you actually need to speed up, these tools don't help with.

oleg009 3y ago
There is a serious knowledge gap between what you just wrote and the actual reality out there. I don't want to convince you of anything, just share the knowledge of what's actually happening. Why tools like Webflow have $4bln valuation and why there are millions of webflow developers. 1. You are looking at it in black/white. Coder vs nocoder. That's not how it is in reality. There is a seriously big amount of people who understand enough of coding to use webflow comfortably but not enough to write code by hand and/or wanting to do so. 2. Designers are used to visual tools. They find their way when tool allows to experiment without first studying how to code and then gradually learn css/html basics if they need to. 3. Building layouts, styling, html structure etc is actually faster with webflow once you understand how it works and learn all the shortcuts. If you actually care to learn about it, go talk to some pro webflow devs. Some of them will tell you they actualy know how to code, but its less efficient for a lot of use cases. 4. Handoff. A huge problem with building websites is wasted time between a designer and a developer. There is just too many things to consider and a static design in figma is never complete. Webstudio and Webflow aims at solving or at least reducing the handoff by either building directly in Webstudio/Webflow or by keeping figma design low-fidelity just for initial communication with the customer and then moving on to building. 5. This industry has come a long way and these days several tools are also integrating with git-based developer workflows. The goal is to let designers and visual developers to build visual components and design systems in the builder ui and provide those components to developers for further integration. 6. There is a clearly steep learning curve with Webflow. Lots of things are not easy to get. Its not a tool to build a website in 5 minutes, its a tool to learn html/css visually and become pro visual developer. Once you are there, the typical landing sites and marketing pages, even large one are built significantly faster and more presize from design perspective than with coding. I am saying this as an engineer who started building for the web in 2004. This is not meant to start an argument. Just pointing out a lot of stuff that is understandably not clear to many.

rw2 3y ago

Webflow is so far ahead with CMS and now membership that it'll be hard for open source to catch up unless it moves significantly faster. I think if this product integrates some kind of popular node CMS it might be able to compete. I might be wrong but it just looks like an front end editor similar to GrapeJS

oleg009 3y ago
You are correct regarding CMS. Same story with e-commerce and other things. In fact fundamentally the architecture is built around the idea of not having those things built-in but rather providing APIs for others to create integrations with any data source: CMSs, Databases, E-commerce etc. Webflow and others with built-in CMS have a massive amount of problems, because there is no one CMS that fits all. Even harder is e-commerce. So yeah, we are not going to compete on that because we are not building any of it, but instead focusing on architecture to support integrations.
rchaud 3y ago
Webflow CMS is expensive, I can see a small business starting out with Webflow and getting locked in. I can't see a more mature business doing this, as they'd want hosting flexibility. WordPress page builders don't have any hosting lock-in.
- rw2 3y ago
  It is expensive, but it's more expensive to hire a programmer to do similar features on a website. Wordpress is more flexible but it just lack the product polish for consumer or even programmers like myself. If I am building a new product, I'm not going to also try to build a website.

andsoitis 3y ago

> Similar to Webflow, Webstudio visually translates... Wait. So in the first sentence on your homepage you mention your competition. Third word. Before you mention yourself.

oleg009 3y ago
Not sure if you are new to the internet :) to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Not sure if you are new to the internet :) :-) > to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them Supabase headline reads: "Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative for building secure and performant Postgres backends with minimal configuration." Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. There I read at the top: "Firebase is an app development platform that helps you build and grow apps and games users love. Backed by Google and trusted by millions of businesses around the world." And right after there's a "Get Started" button. Since supabase is just an open source alternative (according to their copy) of Firebase (but is it really? it talks about postgres backends not apps?), I'd rather go with the thought leader in this space. Supabase, if you're reading this: what's your elevator pitch? What makes you the leader for building apps or whatever it is you do? Why would I want to follow you?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    > Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. You almost got it :) 95 pct of people arriving on WebStudios' site will be coming from search engines. What search term did they most likely use? Webflow, perhaps? You are confused by the marketing copy because the website link was given to you, you didn't have to think of anything to search for.

sampullman 3y ago

The editor is pretty slick for a beta, but I wonder what the benefit is of releasing an app before, or instead of, a browser version. It seems to be written in react native (?), so I assume it's not a technical reason. (edit: I notice it actually is possible to use the builder in the browser, but that doesn't seem to be advertised anywhere!) One of the problems I've seen with no-code editors is that a small to medium sized site might be contracted out to a developer or agency that builds it with WebFlow. Since the layout and style ends up complex enough that the client can't do much with it themselves, they need to go back to the original contractor, or find someone else who specializes in WebFlow, just to make small changes and bug fixes. Maybe that's fundamentally unsolvable due to the difficulty of producing a complicated site, but it feels like it should be possible to do better. The main criticism I have specifically of this editor is that it feels too similar to WebFlow, but with fewer features, and I can't use it from a browser. The design tokens/local styles might be interesting, but I don't think it's fleshed out enough yet to say whether it's a significant improvement on WebFlow's style selector. I think there's plenty of room to iterate and improve on WYSIWYG builder UX in general though, so I look forward to how the project evolves!

oleg009 3y ago
I am confused, we only have a download button at the bottom of the page, but "Get early access" button everywhere else. It is much harder to find download than to open the browser version ... Similarity to Webflow is not a bug, its a feature. It's designed to feel familiar for Webflow developers. This product is built for them. Check out this video to learn how Design Tokens work in Webstudio. It's built with full knowledge of Webflow Style selector. You are talking to an ex style system engineer from Webflow lol. https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1669441600831868944 https://twitter.com/webstudiois/status/1669441600831868944
- sampullman 3y ago
  Oh! I probably shouldn't write comments before coffee. What happened was that I saw the sign-up page and assumed it was just for creating an account, rather than accessing the web builder. I should have realized what was going on when the same login screen appeared in the downloaded app. I'm familiar with Webflow and the design tokens make sense to me, but I don't think it's a natural abstraction for non-web developers. I saw that you're ex-Webflow, I just meant to express a general frustration with how existing builders deal with reusable styles - it totally makes sense in the context of targeting devs who already know the Webflow UX. For what it's worth, I've been working on a site builder for the past few months and ended up with a similar solution, so this criticism is partly a projection of my own struggles. Anyway, thanks for replying! The project looks great, I look forward to see what you end up with wrt versioning and animations.

ano88888 3y ago

need a good react component visual builder that produces code you can then customize. You still have code but it speed things up

jsunderland323 3y ago
Storybook?
- solardev 3y ago
  I think that's more of a component documenter than builder, no?

victorbjorklund 3y ago

Down for me. HN-hug of death?