Announcing free websites for all users
Designware makes it more accessible than ever for designers to build websites and apps from scratch.
I started my first company right after graduating from art school. It began as a game studio and evolved into a web and app development agency. We worked on tons of products in those years for ourselves and clients, but I was never truly satisfied with the process.
I’m a UI/UX designer by trade, and throughout the years became self-taught in the parallel discipline of frontend programming. But I wouldn’t be able to code a complete product from scratch. Hiring people to custom code has always been expensive, slow, and somewhat unpredictable due to the variable nature of scopes and schedules. On the flip side, using template-based website builders to generate the same projects ends up looking cheap and generic, while app builders lack the required UI finesse of modern, successful products.
I wanted to address this huge gap in the market, and that’s how the idea for Designware manifested: make it easier and vastly more affordable for fellow designers to create sophisticated apps and websites, by themselves. My objective is for our users to not have to clear out their schedule for three months every time they have a new idea or have their work product handed off to a dev team (who may or may not hit the spec of the original vision).
If that user is also an entrepreneur, they can skip the business plan, limit the fundraising, save their valuable equity, and dramatically lower personal risk on the way to market. They can just build and release, simple as that.
My team and I have spent the last three years building a no-code platform that would give our users full design control, and the ability to publish their projects live to any format or platform, from websites to native app store distribution. We truly believe everyone should be able to create beautiful projects, regardless of technical or financial means. And today, we’re backing that up by changing our pricing: websites are now 100% free.
What’s included with your free websites
Some web builders already offer free websites, but Designware’s free plan includes unique options that allow you to go the extra mile:
- Custom domains: most importantly, your live site is not stuck with a designware.io domain (although always available). You get to publish your website to any custom domain you have, without an upcharge.
- Unlimited pages and assets: you can create as many pages and upload as many assets as your projects require. There are no arbitrary paywalls.
- Free hosting and SSL security: “This connection is not private. Are you sure you want to proceed” is not something your visitors will have to face. Designware websites are fully hosted and secured by default.
- Hundreds of section components: you can build your pages from scratch, or populate them from beautiful section templates that get you across the finish line.
- Full access to our editing features: last but not least, you get to customize everything from style to responsive layouts. Visually, without coding.
Coming next to Designware
Right now, Designware is the best and most affordable (read: free!) platform if you want to get familiar with the future of no-code design tools and build a simple project like your portfolio website.
Portfolio sites resonate with me personally because I’m a designer that’s built them for my own job applications and reviewed countless more as an employer. A good portfolio is the most important asset to our career advancement, whether you work for a company, an agency, or as a freelancer. And let’s not forget, a designer’s website is part of their portfolio. It needs to represent you, your style, and your competency producing an easy and attractive UI/UX.
Generating your portfolio is a great way to familiarize yourself with Designware and be ready to take full advantage of our next product update later this year. Our team is working hard on new features that will allow you to build fully-interactive apps and websites.
Here’s what you can expect very soon:
- Custom Components: whether you’re building a button, hero banner, or even a whole page template, you’ll be able to save content to your project’s component library and re-use it across all pages. These can be saved as simple starter templates, or as main components that can push and pull updates from their instances. Critically, you can have infinite nested components, each with independent interactions. And it all integrates seamlessly with your existing type style and colour components. It’s a design system built by designers, for designers.
- Databases: you’ll be able to set up powerful databases in a familiar spreadsheet layout, each with unlimited fields (columns) for content like text and images. This content can be manually edited, synced from Airtable or Google Sheets, or populated from user inputs in published apps and websites.
- Tutorials: you can expect easy-to-follow videos created by designers, to help you get the best out of Designware, as quickly as possible.
In other words, we’re making Designware more affordable, more interactive, and easier to use. I want it to become the platform you use to create your best work, advance your design career, and realize your full value for both projects and employers.
We can’t wait to see what you build, so please reach out to show us your websites and apps, or to ask us anything. We’ll help in any way we can, and would love to help promote your creations.
You can sign up here to start building free websites. And in the meantime, stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming up soon!
