The machine that will build your next website
In 1997 a programme called Dreamweaver let you design websites using a visual drag and drop editor. It was fantastic for the novice who didn’t know how to write code, and although it had a bit of a steep learning curve it was easy enough to load up someone else’s design and tweak that to suit your needs. The end result might not have been unique but it was generally good enough. In the 1990s, good enough was all you needed.
In the 19 years since Dreamweaver first launched, the internet, the technology behind it, and the devices people use to consume it have all moved on dramatically. Yet the tools available to non-web developers for creating their own websites still rely on the same old formula established in the 1990s. The software has become more sophisticated and accessible, but the gap between the developers and the non-techies is wider than ever.
In a world where everybody does everything online, it speaks volumes that more than 50% of small businesses still do not have their own website. The problem is, and always has been, that they don’t have the right tools available to them.
THE RIGHT TOOLS… FOR THE WRONG JOB
Dreamweaver has hundreds of competitors now, from heavily backed businesses like Wix and Wordpress to more specialised platforms like Instapage and Shopify. The tech has been refined but the paradigm distils down to exactly the same reality: it is too difficult and time-consuming to learn how to use the tools to make your own unique design, so you start with somebody else’s design and hack away at that.
Every modern website builder starts with the same setup screen: a presentation of different themes or templates with nicely arranged screenshots and a prompt to choose your favourite one as a starting point. And they really are very similar, as these screenshots of the setup screens for four of the biggest website builders on the current market demonstrate:
The process then devolves into a time-consuming trial-and-error exercise of hacking away at the template to make your own content, images and products fit within its pre-defined layout. If you have time and a design eye on your side, you can produce some decent results. But for the vast majority of users the most realistic goal is to thrash out a result that is good enough. It is the same quick-fix solution that Dreamweaver users resorted to all those years ago, commoditised into a slick e-commerce transaction.
Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace and all the other myriad tools on the market rely heavily on professional web developers who do little more than supply a marketplace with off-the-shelf designs for end users to buy and tinker with. The software tools they provide present the illusion of freedom, but your mileage from those tools will vary hugely depending on your skill and for the most part you are well advised to deviate as little as possible from the flat-pack template. They are to websites what IKEA is to furniture.
To build a truly customised website there is still no escaping the fact that, currently, you need to hire a professional web designer. Even the existing self-service website builders acknowledge this explicitly by the fact they all have developer kits and marketplaces where people can hire a professional to create a truly custom template for them.
That’s because these services are not website builders, they are template modifiers.
Nothing has fundamentally changed since 20 years ago, and it’s about time that it did.
Firedrop: the “content first” website builder
Outside of the merely incremental advances in web builder technology, there has been a seismic shift in one particular area of web technology that will make a huge difference: artificial intelligence. We are finally at a point where computers can start to make better decisions for people and, in turn, provide much more freedom for people to focus on the things that really matter. At Firedrop, we are using artificial intelligence to do exactly that for the website builder, and finally make it easy and quick to get a unique website based around you and your business.
Consider a website building tool that analyses your content first and then builds a bespoke design based around that content, rather than first asking you to pick a design and then trying to get your content to fit into that. Consider that it also gathers details about your business, brand and target market then uses that information to further tailor the design. Finally, consider a system that evolves over time, learning from your input and your visitors’ behaviour and using that knowledge to enhance your website in various ways.
This is Firedrop, and we can’t wait for you to use it.
Originally published at blog.firedrop.ai on June 1, 2016.
