This is interesting. I'm blind, and while I can think of ideas for products/side projects, designing a nice-looking website is such a huge momentum-killer. I mean, I know that I <i>could</i> just focus on features, keep the site design simple, and build a good design later. Then I visit <insert random Show HN here>, and half the comments are about how some UI element or other breaks on some combination of browser or other, and the last thing I want is to have my idea dismissed because it's ugly. I thought Bootstrap would help with this, but when my sighted GF takes one look at my attempts at site design, her first comments revolve around lack of color, and I don't even know where to begin with that. And yes, I know about themes, but sometimes that feels like I'd have to make my idea fit the theme, whereas this seems to let me pick and choose what elements I want.<p>Unfortunately, when asked to select a hero block, I'm greeted with a series of images. Would you consider adding alt attributes to these? If I knew roughly what they looked like, I could probably pick and choose something semi-appropriate for a given project. I don't know what other issues I'm likely to hit, but I'd be interested in providing additional feedback if this at all seems like a viable direction.<p>Also, just noticed I can't select a hero block via the keyboard. Items aren't tab-focusable and keyboard-selectable. Maybe this won't work at all for me, but I'd really like something between "Here's a fully-formed theme" and "Here's a completely inaccessible website builder that gives you a blank canvas and assumes you don't want to touch the final HTML." :) If anyone knows of anything like that, please do share.
Brilliant execution and so refreshing to just be given everything needed at the end rather than a download link via email. Throw in an optional donation button (so people can tip you $20, $50, $100, $150, etc) and careful hosting upsells to make it painless and this will become a solid earner. Well done and good luck - you're on the right track.
Really fantastic UI. And I LOVE party parrot at the end. Made me smile.<p>Depending on your target audience, I'd love to see some tooling to help with a signup form. Maybe offer some integration options (and an affiliate link) for Mailchimp or something else?<p>I'd also love the ability to easily create multiple pages linked to each other within the app. Sure I can create separate pages, but would be nice to have that done for me and add some basic organization.<p>Overall this is really awesome. Would love to know more about what technology you used to build this, why you built it, and what your future product/monetization plans are.
Once I figured out what was going on, I liked it. But at first, I thought you were really trying to sell me domains the whole time. I thought it was a big marketing page for a hosting/domain service, and did not realize it was actually all editable. You really need to make it clear what is going on if you want to open this to a larger audience.
This is fantastic. One argument people will make (just like they did with Bootstrap) is that if every product used something like this, all the webpages would look the same.<p>To be honest, if all product webpages looked like this, I'd be quite alright with it, because this look great.<p>Well done!
The builder works very well once you realize what you're supposed to do. After designing the first block, I didn't realize I had to keep going. Maybe a more apparent CTA would be appropriate?<p>I'm curious, will you be adding a hosting option for these? Right now they provide a good starting point, but I would love a one-click hosting option so that I can quickly made a page and push it live. The ability to plug in things like Google Analytics token would also be awesome.
Asking for my email <i>after</i> letting me download my template??<p>I'm not sure if it is the most effective way to collect emails, but it sure is a good UX. As a reward, I included my email :)
Really well done. Few quick questions...<p>Why not use an off-the-shelf grid system like Bootstrap or Foundation? Would probably make this easier to edit / extend for people already familiar with those layout frameworks.<p>For SEO... things like Page Title, Meta Description, OG/Sharing Meta Data... those would be good to add somehow. "Click here to add your fav icon / bookmark icon / social share icon / etc." At least adding them as empty fields so people know to add them in manually...<p>Could you add in semantic elements? Wouldn't take long to add those to the base template... <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp</a><p>Really nice tool, can see a lot of people getting use out of this.
Now THIS is how it should be done! Congrats to author! Where can we pay you? :)<p>This hits a sweet spot for me because I am in full control of HTML if I want it, but I can still put together a responsive page in literally a minute.<p>About missing colors and stuff - yeah, it would be nice if we could select background images, set more colors and similar, but that's secondary. Building a responsive skeleton is what this tool does for me, and first impression is great. Kudos!
Nice! Really easy to use and the templates look great. One question though:<p>> Launchaco website builder is licensed under CC0<p>Does that mean both the website builder itself and the website you build with it are CC0? And is the source to the builder available anywhere?
I was pleasantly surprised to receive a .zip file with the site after I made it to the bottom, rather than a call-to-action pushing me to sign up for some hosting plan! Well done.
I love this. Also a super fan of the UI. Seamlessly led me to a download button with the source. They've coupled it with an awesome hosting setup process. I can promise you I will use this service for the very next project of mine.<p>Commoditisation of design cannot come soon enough! ( at least the web design part :) )
I noticed you posted Launchaco a few months ago. Why do you think this post succeeded in generating traction while the previous failed? Love the product!
nitpick: please enable HTTPS<p>I just had some issues on airline wifi because they man-in-the-middle the connection to inject their crappy "flight tracker" menubar and it covered some of the builder controls. That wouldn't happen with SSL and your visitors would be more secure.
I absolutely love this and thats coming from a "professional" web developer.<p>I gave this to a client of mine to try for one of her personal projects and she was somewhat confused. After I pointed out the steps vs previews, she got the hang of it. But by that time she'd made a bit of a mess with a lot of extra feature blocks/steps.<p>She wanted a clean slate but it looks like you're storing progress in a cookie. Can we have a reset all?<p>While I'd love an arbitrary HTML block, the ability to add meta tags, custom fonts, blah blah...don't. If people want that kind of power there's a lot of alternative static site tools/CMS' out there.
Really awesome. Surprised by how much time I spent on there. I noticed when I tried to download it in Safari, it didn't work because I don't think fetch is supported. Would have been good to get a notice about that earlier on. Would also be nice to see what exactly the download button is going to provide (just a zip of HTML/css/JS files I assume?)<p>Thanks for sharing, will probably come back to this. Happy to sign up for email updates
Holy smokes, this is such a useful tool! For any little updates that could certainly be applied in the future (e.g. adding more accessibility aspects, other color palettes, etc.), the sheer ease and speed with which I was able to create a website was absolutely astonishing, and overshadows any shortfall. I seldom share my email but submitted it in this case, because I believe this is a solid product, and I have this feeling the authors behind this tool really know what they're doing (as far as product dev.). Kudos to the creators! Great job!
This is just what I was looking for! I needed a simple landing page for our startup, and the layouts / design are perfect.<p>Quick noob question though: Do you have / are you planning to include templates where I can add video (hosted on Vimeo / Youtube) instead of the computer / browser images?<p>I know I can edit the HTML / CSS files, but my background is statistics / R, and I am wary of mucking up the code and spoiling the layout.<p>I signed up with my email. Looking forward to seeing where this goes, and would gladly pay for the service as & when you start accepting payments.<p>Thank you! :)
Nice work! Really like the way you provide color palette instead wild crazy color selector for your user, that simplifies things so much! However, A common problem with this product and a lot of other template based website builders like Squarespace, Weebly, Wix is, you will end up creating so many sites that looks just the same. If you just want a clone, then I have nothing to say. But more customization and more unique intelligent generation certainly needs advanced models other than naive templates.
Very efficiently done!<p>Love that you didn't force me with any annoying pop-ups or interfering spaces to ask for email. I gave you anyway, with my 100% will.<p>Looking forward to your finished product. My girlfriend wants to build a Yoga website to put in all her stuff and promote her private lessons. I was going to build it myself, but your product is so intuitive that I might give her this and ask her to build it herself!
I'm pretty used to being different from most people, but I'm not used to being so utterly different from the hackernews crowd as I feel right now.<p>Am I seeing a different website than everyone is talking about? All I see is a bunch of different boxes with links, where most links just shove me to some external service (GoDaddy, Twitter, Google Fonts, etc.)<p>Where's the "website builder"?
This looks great but was a little confusing at first. Maybe make it clearer to the user what's going on so they know they're just building their own site.<p>I think it's nice not to have to enter an email at the end, but you'll miss out on a lot of emails. Maybe provide the prompt to enter an email first, but let them skip it.
This is great - I am literally just finishing a site that looks exactly like this (single product site). I would 100% use this for future things!<p>I agree about the donation buttons as well - even keep it to micro-donating - you would be surprised at how many people would use it!
Super cool idea - Though one of my first interactions was to search for an emoji, which failed completely as it deleted my query when I typed more than one letter. (MacOS Sierra, Safari.) Other than that, thumbs up on the delicious UX.
Very cool - I've had ideas for a few sites, but when the time came to create the site and get a half decent design going, I found myself running out of time to work on the actual content. Best of luck to your idea/service
Great idea. This could save me all sorts of wasteful dithering. Looks like it's broken right now. When I try to download, I get a file called "download.txt" which contains the text "Internal Server Error"
would like to point out that the author has not only built a tool that is making a bunch of people happy, but is also responding brilliantly to all comments with a super helpful tone. very cool all around.
That's one of the brilliant service as I have ever tried.<p>Actually, I'll also consider to pay something to this wonderful service. I think producer should consider about adding premium staff for small prices.
Definitely put that "download" file as "template.zip" or something.<p>I was baffled getting a file without extension, and Windows 10 didn't see it as a zip, but just a binary blob.
I haven't even checked the site out (yet, hear me out), but this is one of the most positive reactions I've seen on HN. So congrats on that already.
Looks awesome. Have reviewed a ton of website builders and this is one of the easier ones.<p>Only problem is when I hit the download button the .txt file is blank.
Shameless plug, I made something related which makes testing out public static sites pretty easy. You can check it out at <a href="https://slugex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slugex.com/</a> It also allows you to deploy via the terminal. All you need is bash and curl :)
Sorry to be negative, but I'm honestly mystified by the complimentary comments.<p>First, attempting to set up a domain name sends me to some site named shareasale.com. The site is blocked on my system because I'm using the winhelp2002.mvps.org HOSTS file to block shady web sites.<p>Next, I follow the 4 steps to select the Hero, Feature, Social and Footer templates. How I'm supposed to make an intelligent choice based on the shadowy outlines is beyond me.<p>Finally, I'm apparently supposed to click the Download... link. This gets me a little "success" message - but the end result is a file called "download" with no extension. Renaming the download to download.zip gives me something to extract which is... a single HTML file plus css and image folders. Clicking on the HTML gives me a local copy of the launchaco main page with no sort of customizations or anything.<p>WTF?