

Announcing Viviti: Build websites with no code and no hassle (we hope!) - tkiley
http://viviti.com/welcome

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bprater
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.

~~~
tkiley
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.

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

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tkiley
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!

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webwright
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?

~~~
tomsaffell
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.

~~~
felideon
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.

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fizx
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

~~~
netcan
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.

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fizx
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.

~~~
netcan
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?

~~~
Spyckie
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.

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netcan
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.

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ken
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.

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run4yourlives
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!

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

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avibryant
Where in BC?

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jerrett
Parksville, Vancouver Island!

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bporterfield
do you surf, by chance?

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nerdburn
i do! (interface designer)

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bporterfield
oh yea? Where?

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

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

I love reading about the creators of a service :)

~~~
tkiley
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!

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

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jbyers
Fantastic editing experience, well done.

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apmee
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 :)

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poppysan
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?

~~~
tkiley
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. ;-)

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abecedarius
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.

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owkaye
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 ... :(

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

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tmitchell
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.

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

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matt1
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?

~~~
jerrett
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!)

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

~~~
tkiley
This will be fixed in production later today. Thanks!

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

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

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run4yourlives
After 5 mins of farting around - usability by a long shot.

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

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

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anhhung
one quick question, do you allow custom domain names?

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tkiley
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.

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eli_s
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).

~~~
tkiley
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!

