FireDrop — A Website That Builds Itself

Building a website is hard work. You need to think about a lot of things. How it should look. What it should contain. How heavy it must be. Whom it should target. What browsers it will work on. The list goes on and on and on, and if you’re not an experienced web designer or a developer you’ll soon find yourself stuck in a quagmire with no way out. Some wise heads built up website builders with supposedly easy to use drag-and-drop features that are supposed to help, but end up confusing the user to no end.

So what is an average Joe with no coding knowledge, who can't really afford an expensive designer and who has lost many a hair to clunky “website builders” supposed to do? I wouldn't know really, I've never been in that situation. But the folks at FireDrop seem to have a caught on to something: a website that builds itself. Before you scoff at the notion, let's think for a moment. We have Tesla building cars that drive themselves, we have stuff like Google Now that know what you want before you do, and we have Twitter bots that can carry on conversations almost like real humans. With AI and machine learning really coming into its own, is it really that far fetched to imagine a website that builds itself just by talking to you along the way?

We will soon find out, because FireDrop isn't really ready yet. It is still in alpha and very few people have laid their hands on it. But if you sign up for their early access beta, then you can get a chance to try it out by Q4 2016. The screenshots and features listed on the website look really promising though and I'm rarely wrong about these things. I've been an early user of Maptiks, MapBox and Carto, had a good feeling about them, and all three of those have turned out to be great successes.

My intuition is hardly something for you to go by but the way FireDrop describes itself is really interesting and should catch you're attention. It asks you a series of questions and understands your needs before anything is built. Makes sense. Then, it allows you to add content without worrying about the nitty-gritties of formatting. Once this is done, it gathers all the information, thinks for a while and then vomits out a design that it thinks you might like. It also keeps a few spares in case you didn't like the first choice.

Now at this point, its easy to be critical and there are high chances that the end result might not be exactly what you had in mind. But therein lie the challenges. For a great end product the app relies on two key aspects: how well it understands your needs and how well does it turn those needs into a truly good end product. In order to understand your needs it needs to ask the right questions, so if these questions are asked correctly, the end product should match the requirements.

All of this is theory based on what I've seen on the website so far, so I can't wait to get my hands dirty and give it a whirl.

If I'm right though, and FireDrop does turn out to be a great product, we might just witness a revolution in the way websites are built.