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Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

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Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#11

Post by putrikarunia »

pwillia7 wrote: post #10
putrikarunia wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't build an ecommerce site yet, but we are building the CMS feature that would allow you to do this somewhat. What do you mean by next integrations? It doesn't support PWA yet. Do you have input on this? And yes presenting on nextjsconf would have been really cool!!

Thanks! Next JS has a starter kit for a few different platforms called nextjs commerce - https://nextjs.org/commerce Getting to PWA would probably be pretty simple since you just need a service worker to qualify if I remember right -- https://developers.google.com/web/ilt/pwa/introduction-to-se... Making PWA valuable and doing things like prefetching pages would probably be a much bigger task but is really incredible…

Oh that's awesome, thanks for sharing this to me!

I see, I personally haven't played around with PWA much, but that sounds like something we should look into, thank you!

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#12

Post by monkeynotes »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #3

I’m very impressed with what you’ve discussed here. I think there’s a real market for no-code website builders that are user-friendly. How do you justify charging $144/year for a static site? Carrd.co offers similar features and charges $19/year for their Pro plan. Serving a static site is basically free. If your editor itself is that valuable, why not sell the editor as a software package and let me take my built si…

$144/year sounds about right to me. A little higher than SquareSpace and being the new cat in town I'd suggest undercutting them to get traction, but overall I don't think it's far out.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#14

Post by putrikarunia »

splch wrote: post #13

I noticed there're some trackers in the pages. Is it possible to completely remove all tracking and make the site have better privacy?

Yes it's possible. By default we include a Google Analytics tag on published sites, but you can contact us to disable it on your site.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#16

Post by ryanSrich »

Interesting UX.

Certainly more complex sites would need more complex controls. I have a love hate relationship with Webflow. On one hand I'm much faster coding HTML and CSS by hand, but Webflow handles the things I don't want to handle. Stuff like collections, pagination, forms, etc. Can I build all of those things? Sure, but it's a waste of my time if I can click a button and get a form up that sends me an email in less than 30 seconds.

There are so many things that Webflow does not do though. Stuff like excluding pages from an autogenerated sitemap (no idea how this isn't a feature), sending a follow up email when someone submits a form (I need to use Zapier to do this), gaited content that's user specific (something like memberstack, but better), more control over managing large numbers of pages. Like if I want to add a word to every page title instance of every page, I have to go into every single page's settings and update it. For a site with 100+ pages it's not feasible. I could list a dozen other missing features.

So do you see Typedream competing with Webflow, and getting into more complex controls, and even building some of the integrations you have listed as native features (which I'd personally love so I don't have to have 1000 subscriptions just to run a marketing site), or is the vision to stay simple, and target other use cases?

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#17

Post by codebeaker »

>Much like Notion and other block editing methods, site content is represented in a JSON format. Each block has a type, for example, a block of Paragraph would have the type "Paragraph" and would be represented by {"type":"paragraph", "text": "Hello World"}, and an image would have the type "Image" represented by {"type":"image", "url":"http://placekitten.com/200/300"}. A page consists of an array of blocks representing the blocks in the page. A page that consists of a Heading, a Paragraph, and an Image would be represented by an array of maps with types “heading”, “paragraph”, and “image” respectively. A block can also have children. For example, a block of type “Container” may have 3 children of “Paragraph” blocks. It’s very similar to the DOM structure.

Why not make a DOM Editor then with virtual components? The JSONReact serialization doesn't seem to offer much value, unless it's purely mechanical.

I don't mean to detract from the praise your product is getting here, but I'm really curious about those motivations if you have time to answer my query in amongst the other more excited threads, I'd be glad to understand what the trade-off buys you?

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#19

Post by putrikarunia »

ryanSrich wrote: post #16

Interesting UX. Certainly more complex sites would need more complex controls. I have a love hate relationship with Webflow. On one hand I'm much faster coding HTML and CSS by hand, but Webflow handles the things I don't want to handle. Stuff like collections, pagination, forms, etc. Can I build all of those things? Sure, but it's a waste of my time if I can click a button and get a form up that sends me an email in…

Interesting question, to be honest we're still navigating this. Our goal is to stay simple, while reaching feature parity with other website builders.

We want to take a different UX approach to most of the features necessary for website building, to make sure beginners can make a functional website with almost no learning curve. Of course, that's a huge challenge :D.

And yes, we do plan on building the frequently-used integrations as native features. Our plan for the near future is to build a native CMS, forms, gated content like Memberstack, some simple animation, and email newsletter. We're sort of taking inspiration from Ghost & Notion on UX, and SquareSpace/Webflow/etc for features.

However, we probably are not competing directly with Webflow, as our target users are quite different. Webflow seems to target designers that require complete control over every pixel. While for us, we focus more on builders/founders that want to get something out fast while keeping sites looking pretty & modern by providing design defaults.

Re: Launch HN: Typedream (YC W20) – WYSIWYG website builder

#20

Post by putrikarunia »

codebeaker wrote: post #17

>Much like Notion and other block editing methods, site content is represented in a JSON format. Each block has a type, for example, a block of Paragraph would have the type "Paragraph" and would be represented by {"type":"paragraph", "text": "Hello World"}, and an image would have the type "Image" represented by {"type":"image", "url":" http://placekitten.com/200/300 "}. A page consists of an array of blocks represe…

I'm not sure I can visualize what you mean by a DOM Editor, would love it if you can expand on that.

The JSON format allows us to only specify the main type/value of each block, while giving full flexibility on how to render them. I think there are several approaches to rich text editing out there, we picked this one because it seemed to be the most flexible and portable, as we need to invent our own types of standard "blocks", like columns, containers, etc.

Not sure if this answers your question though, happy to go deeper if you have more thoughts on it.

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