Announcing Viviti: Build websites with no code and no hassle (we hope!) | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Viviti: Build websites with no code and no hassle (we hope!)

viviti.com

64 pointstkiley58 comments

It's obvious there has been a tremendous amount of development time invested in the project. Looks great, feels good. There are many site builders out there, so I think execution counts for a lot.

Two quick suggestions:

1) Get a demo video up on the homepage. Show a person what they can do.

2) Get a demo video up after a person has signed up. If my dad were using this, he could walk through the wizard up to the point where he arrives at his site. Then he'd get lost as to what he should click on next to accomplish whatever task is in his head.

Good points. Getting a demo video up on the homepage is a priority at this point; for orientation after sign-up, we're thinking about doing a quick overlay/popup that explains how to edit and add content. I don't think it should take more than a few hints to help people through creating their first few pages.

Thanks for checking it out.

$0.02: I would prefer to try the site or view a video before I hand over my email address.

Viviti, our beloved new CMS/sitebuilder, has been under development for several years now. The CMS market is crowded, but we're going for a level of simplicity and flexibility that hasn't been achieved by any of the solutions out there right now.

Feedback is always welcome!

A code-free experience is presumably for non-geeks, right?

Your signup form has a field called "hostname". Nitpicky, but... How many non-geeks have the vaguest idea wtf that means?

Heh, I've spent so much time working on that model that I didn't even realize that word was there. Thanks for pointing it out!

IMO this is not nitpicky - it's a crucial implementation detail. In a quick scan of the main page I saw two similar tech-speaks:

- Use your own domain name (why not 'website address')

- ..with no code (what does 'no code' mean to a non tech person??)

This looks like a good product, but to really address the target audience it needs wording to them (or maybe you need different versions for different types of customer?). See if you can borrow someone's granny for the acid test.

I agree. "Code" may not mean much to non-technical people. Something like "no programming" might be more meaningful, although I'm wondering if you could even leave it out altogether.

The tool itself is wonderful. I'd switch my blog from wordpress to it, if it had analytics, and I knew you'd be around a year from now.

Minor thing on signup:

Password: ancmthdnvu Password Strength: You're kidding, right?

Password: 123456 Password Strength: Admirable

Thanks for the feedback. We'll keep working on the password strength checker :) We're trying to make it a little fun so people will voluntarily choose stronger passwords.

Frankly, this is not a good idea. You absolutely should not substitute your judgment for others. If you want to have a strength checker, go ahead - but don't require someone to have one.

What did you mean by 'had analytics?' Google Analytics?

If that's your issue, I think you could drop the code into the 'theme' & that'd do it.

You could also chuck it into a "custom html" block, but adding it to the theme would let you put it in the head tags

we will be also adding some simple page statistics soonish, but google analytics will provide much more in depth statistics!

Wordpress has web analytics built into the main blog dashboard. It's nice. I could drop code into a theme, but I kinda like the ease of use there.

I guess that if it come down to features, it's going to be difficult to beat old-timers off the bat.

You say that apart from that, you'd switch. Why? Just something else r anything particularly good about this?

the site is very good, but i'll have to agree with op (of this comment). analytics is very important. i would switch from wordpress to this because this has a lot more options than a blogging engine but it still can be used as one.

> you could drop the code...

> with no code and no hassle.

See the issue now?

Not really. ;-)

Our goal is to make lots of things very, very easy for new users, and make lots of other things readily available for well-informed users. Right now, we aren't aiming to make in-depth analytics very, very easy, because we don't currently believe it's critical for our new users (after all, if you don't have enough of an understanding of the world wide web to make some minor code edits, you probably aren't going to be deriving much value from sophisticated analytics anyway).

With that said, our theming/templating architecture plays well with google analytics, so it's readily available for well-informed users, and we'll be releasing some basic integrated stats soonish.

I agree with the general approach.

Core things very very easy for anyone, including grandma. Some things relatively easy but requiring a little code to achieve.

But needing Google Analytics & the ability/confidence to install it yourself do not necessarily go hand in hand.

There are certainly many site builders out there. The vast majority are painful to use. Especially for the type of user I think this aims at. This one is very nicely done. Both the concept (very self explanatory) & the execution are very good. I had a fairly thorough run-through & I am very impressed.

I think I might have a good use for one of these, but I'd need to see if it can be used reasonably over a dial-up connection. Speed seemed to be a bit of an issue for me. Both the 'back end' & the 'front end'.

This seems like a great blogging platform. I can't say that I know what you are after here. But I can say that the need I come across without really finding a solution that I'm thrilled with is more towards the traditional website end of the blob/site spectrum.

The basic difference (I think) is the navigation structure. Handling a navigation with 10-50 links reasonably easily (submenu items, dynamically created sibling pages & the like) & having some tools to create a 'home page' with a different.

1. Show more features, or show them more in-depth. (It doesn't need to be a video, but it could be.) Unless I'm really interested, I'm not going to sign up for something just to find out what it can do. Or maybe create a shared demo account with a public password, if collaboration is one of your features.

2. I'm wondering what this has to do with Panic's Coda, since your logo looks eerily similar to theirs, from the wavy light-green leaf right down to the water droplets and veins.

Well done, this is very good.

I'm guessing you guys are Canadian as well from the cbc feed in the examples? Nice to see some good tech coming our of the great white north! Sometimes I feel all alone up here!

Thanks! We're located in British Columbia, Canada!

Where in BC?

Parksville, Vancouver Island!

do you surf, by chance?

Not yet, snowboard and mountain bike though :)

i do! (interface designer)

oh yea? Where?

in tofino - only a few times a year :) if the weather were warmer in canada i'd go more often. you?

Ok, so how the hell did you find 4 rails guys in fricken' Parksville?

Some of us geeks like to spend our time away from computers climbing, kayaking, hiking, snowboarding, mountain biking, sailing, or camping... for such a life, Vancouver Island is hard to beat :)

Fair enough. Is there a larger group of hackers out there as well? I find it hard enough to find a good community here in Vancouver, that's why I'm asking. :-)

Uhm...having a hard time finding an about page (both company about and people about).

I love reading about the creators of a service :)

Shamiq,

We're planning to put up an "about" page (as well as a more extended explanation of features) as soon as our designer can get it all put together visually. Should be sometime later this week.

In the meantime, check out the blog: http://blog.viviti.com/

There's quite a bit of info about the development of Viviti in there, plus links to the personal sites of all the developers.

Thanks for checking it out!

And that blog links to our personal blogs, too :)

Fantastic editing experience, well done.

Very good first impression. Very attractive site design - simple and elegant - and I like your tasty use of sIFR. You've clearly lavished care and attention on it and it shows.

The weary exasperation of the password strength checker is a nice touch too :)

Check out type room. pretty similar, but works on non hosted sites as well.

Also, Sythasite is very close in a lot of ways....check them out also.

I am sure you have already seen these, but they are 2 outstanding competitors. Any answer to them?

Usability! ;-)

In all seriousness, Viviti and typeroom share some of the same features, but it looks like typeroom is an editing tool, not a hosted solution, and that's not a market we're interested in.

Synthasite is also a useful tool, but when it comes right down to it, the design of any tool makes some things impossible, some things doable, and some things easy. We're aiming to make some previously impossible things doable and some previously hard things easy, and I think so far, we're succeeding. ;-)

The signup page offers to use OpenID, apparently in place of giving you an email address; then when I get back it still requires my email. It's not clear why I should have bothered to sign in with OpenID then.

The layout is ruined in a narrow browser window. Obviously you never gave this much thought. Why not?

Sorry to sound so 'critical' but you asked for it. I hate websites like this even more than websites that make me scroll horizontally, because at least horizontal scrolling lets me see the page properly

Nothing works to fix your site except a wider browser window ... :(

Thanks for pointing that out. We fixed the CSS issue, and we'll get it out to the production servers later today.

This is pretty slick... I've been putting off creating a site for some side projects. This may be just the ticket!

My question/feature request: Is there a way to share edit access with more than one user? This would be especially useful for the blogging features, to allow multiple contributors.

Not yet, but there will be. We have some pretty cool plans for multi-user stuff for reasons you've stated, and others :)

As others have said, awesome site. Seems like you've done just about everything right.

I'm curious how you came up with your site's Terms of Service, which seem well done and comprehensive. Did a lawyer come up with that or did you come up with it yourselves?

Lawyer wrote it, and we consulted with him on it. We don't want to be doing anything ugly in our TOS (that said if anyone sees anything that looks out of place in there, email feedback@viviti.com so we can take a look!)

Minor bugfix: your 'terms of service' link in the footer goes to /about/privacy instead of (I assume) /about/tos.

This will be fixed in production later today. Thanks!

You might consider some security on the sign up form. Otherwise this is pretty dope.

What value do you have over your competitors, like Weebly and Freewebs?

After 5 mins of farting around - usability by a long shot.

Can I ask a question? What led? Design or development?

Bit of both, depending on which part of the process - you might say we played leap frog?

one quick question, do you allow custom domain names?

We sure do. It's not yet a part of the sign-up process, but once you've created an account, you can add custom domain names.

You guys really have an excellent product here. Extremely easy to use, great features and looks great too.

I'm sure you will get lots of users. What type of pricing will you be looking at?

I think you could work on optimising the page updates. Simply swapping the image in the header resulted in a full page reload which added up to almost 1mb! This makes the site seem (slightly)slow and makes it completely inaccessible to dial up users (yes they're still out there! hehe).

Funny that you would test the header image first. We've managed to do partial updates for most content on the pages, but right now we still do a full reload (window.location.reload(true), for you DOM junkies) for image replacements.

We haven't nailed down the pricing structure yet, but we will be announcing it very soon, and we'll definitely have a free version.

Thanks for the feedback!

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