Show HN: Synesthesia – Visual Website Builder | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Synesthesia – Visual Website Builder

synesthesia.ai

43 pointsDiego-Little33 comments

Synesthesia is a platform that allows you to create create, customize, and publish your own website. It allows you to select free templates to get started, it has a drag and drop editor to customize the website to your liking, and it publishes and hosts your newly created website. You can also view website analytics and upload content to update your website.

I would love to hear any feedback on the project.

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How is this different from say Squarespace (which I've never used btw)? The website doesn't really tell me. The slogan says it's "The Next Generation of Website Builders" but then doesn't tell me why. Does it have more functionality? Is it easier to use? Is it cheaper? Is there AI, and what does it do?

Basically, as a potential customer, why would I choose this product over the one that everyone's heard of? All I got from the site is that I can build a page "in 3 easy steps" - aren't all the website builders like that?

Think you're more likely to get customers if the site is updated with answers to the above :)

I appreciate the feedback and I think that's the most critical question for me to answer right now. I think Web Factory is more customizable so you can change the majority of the styles to create unique designs. I hope that as I continue to iterate on it, it becomes easier to use than alternatives and it's slightly cheaper than Webflow and Squarespace. The AI part of it is still a work in progress for future updates, but I'm building a system that can convert Figma Designs into source code to automate web development. I think updating the landing page and finishing the desired features is a great idea. Thank you!

Glad I was somewhat helpful haha. Hope it all works out! Btw I think the design of the landing page is great :)

What is the product? I don't want to hand over an email address based on an Adobe Illustrator mockup of maybe a screen inside the product.

Now seems to be redirecting to ... https://webfactory.ai/

It's redirecting as 301 "Moved Permanently" as well which doesn't make sense given the post is 7 hours old.

Yeah, I apologize for the confusion, I decided to change the name to Web Factory AI since I made the post but can't edit the title or description.

What's the "AI" component? Not being arsey - genuinely interested, but couldn't find anything on the website.

Hey there, the server seems to be down for me.

Hey, thanks for letting me know, I'm looking into it

The name is a bit confusing because there is another program called Synthesia that is basically Guitar Hero for piano.

Thank's for the feedback, there's also another AI Video generation called Synthesia as well so I decided to change it Web Factory

How is this better than Wordpress?

Does it help me with SEO?

What do I do if I need a liiiittle bit of extra functionality like a contact form.

The design of the website is more customizable as you can change the majority of the styling properties for any element of the website. I haven't built anything to optimize the sites for SEO, but that's a great idea. I'm currently finishing contact form functionality where you get form submissions built into the application or set a custom action attribute to send them to your own url.

Why the .ai extension?

Server down rn

What makes this ...

> The Next Generation of Website Builders

... compared to all the other similar services already available?

That's a good question, the design is fully customizable so you can't edit most CSS properties in the editor. I'm also planning future updates that includes a system for automatically generating a virtual DOM serialized in JSON from Figma files which can be built into a website or application

So it is not a next generation editor at least yet? I personally do find this kind of marketing language off-putting – if the main promise is basically a false one, I immediately get suspicious of the whole product in general and dismiss it without even trying it out :/ I would rather read a honest "simple to use" even it is not that loud or unique. Note that this is not a critique on the product itself, just the landing page.

What should one do to get past the HN Hug of Death on launch day?

I'm looking to show HN my project next month and would love to know a good strategy to avoid the hug of death.

>I'm looking to show HN my project next month and would love to know a good strategy to avoid the hug of death.

Cloudflare. There's no reason for a landing page to ever hit an app server.

Have a static page on standby and point it to something to collect email addresses. Don't spend too much time beyond that and any other basics you know of, like DB indices, etc.

The worst thing you can do is delay the launch of the project to work on scaling.

Is there a way to simulate a hug of death? Are there any tools or services for that? Seems like they're using Cloudflare, but maybe needs an active server connection to use the product.

> ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html

I tried using puppeteer in nodejs with a loop that opens a bunch of pages and recorded the response time on the server which helped me find that the source of the problem was the docker deployment of it in my case.

Put up a static page with a video that shows how it works. Explain on that page that the HN hug of death took it down and ask people to give you their email so you can contact them when you're back up.

Oh also, don't feel stupid about this. I've done dumber things, like not knowing what ulimit was for a few months while chasing down all sorts of other rabbits that lead to nowhere. Crashing because too many people want to use your software is the best problem you could ever wish to have.

Yeah, I had to quickly setup a new server deployment and replace the previous domain name but should have something up for now.

Related question, what level of traffic should one be prepared for to avoid HN Hug of Death?

In the generative synthetic world who’s actually reading websites

in the future, the robots will be the only ones who've actually read what humans wrote

I think websites are still the best way of processing and communicating information for AI and humans alike

How can you be so sure?

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