Member Update - November 2018
As 2018 draws to a close, it’s time to sit down and look at what’s been added to your Without Code membership in the last few months and share our priorities for the year ahead.
We’re very excited about what’s coming, and we have big plans to develop new resources (and even all new businesses) designed to help you be even more successful as a designer or business owner. Hang on for a long post, we’ve got plenty to share.
Please note that plans and priorities are subject to change.
Opening Thoughts
2018 was a pivotal year for designers in the Muse space and digital resource companies like MuseThemes. The sudden and unexpected Muse end of life announcement forced us all to reinvent ourselves, and while very stressful at times, I suspect we’ll all look back on it as the start of something amazing. When you’re forced to rebuild your business from scratch, it gives you the opportunity to improve on all of your weak areas and narrow your focus on the exact product and market that you love.
Without Code is an exciting and refreshing business – the platform is incredibly powerful and stable, we can offer faster and higher quality support to our users, and the overall feedback from our market has been extremely positive. I’m proud to see amazing sites published daily, and not only do those sites look great, but they perform at a very high level. Users are consistently reporting increased traffic, better search rankings and happy clients after moving to the platform.
With that said, we need your help in sharing these results with the industry. The website builder market is highly competitive, and we’re up against some big players. We would be forever grateful if you shared your positive experience in your daily browsing – Facebook reviews
and community groups, online forums or anywhere that you designers hang out!
Thanks once again for your support so far, and we look forward to a long partnership with you in the future.
2019 Core Site Reorganization
Since our initial site launch in April 2018, all of our focus has been on developing new platform features and widgets, and as a result our core site feels neglected. To improve our speed and ability to roll out updates to the site, we’re going to split up our core site and account dashboard (aka. “the app”) into two separate systems. This change will improve the speed of the Without Code site itself and give us more flexibility to enhance the interface design of our account and site dashboard.
While no change in core functionality is planned, you may notice that links to the account dashboard are directed to a subdomain (e.g. app.wocode.com). We’re planning a full dashboard redesign early next year, and the core site will be rebuilt from the ground up using Architect! Nothing beats the SEO, site optimization and rapid design capabilities of our own builder!
Enterprise Plan
In our early planning for Without Code, we mapped out an “Enterprise” feature list, which offered additional tools and white label resources to designers and agencies building multiple sites for clients. Pricing for enterprise plans has not yet been finalized.
We’re close to rolling out our initial Enterprise offering, and I’m excited to share some of the highlights:
- Enterprise includes all current VIP features – CMS users, premium themes, etc.
- Receive discounted per site hosting fees – we’re proposing $75 per year, or $7.50 per month, allowing you to make more money on the sites you build.
- One free personal or agency hosted site. This is our thank you for adopting the platform and moving your client sites on board.
- White labeled theme gallery – host a gallery of our templates for your clients to review and choose from.
- White label sales materials – unbranded and pre-designed fact sheets, sales resources and case studies we develop to help you land new customers.
- Live chat support offering and private enterprise member channel. Get faster help when you need it, and share information with designers building lots of Without Code sites.
- Several new products and features that are currently under development.
We welcome your feedback – feel free to comment below or send feedback and requests to info@wocode.com.
DNS Changes – New A-Records
We recently implemented a major DNS change that allows you to use A-Records (IP Addresses) to hook up your domains to Without Code. This new method will simplify the domain connection process across a wide variety of domain registrars. It also ensures your site works on naked (non-www) domains, with and without SSL certificates installed. Lastly, there may be a small SEO bump by utilizing the new method due to an update we’ve made to canonical tags.
In order to take advantage of this new domain linking process, you’ll need to remove your existing 301 redirects and add two new A-Records to your DNS settings. Check out our full setup guide for more details. This change is not urgent, and the old method for linking up domains will still continue to work going forward.
Ecommerce 100 Product Plan – Price Increase
Due to a price change through an outside vendor, the pricing on our 100 product tier ecommerce plan is increasing effective immediately. Ecommerce sites with up to 100 products will now be priced at $190 per year, or $18 when paid monthly. This change will only impact new ecommerce subscriptions – existing subscriptions will continue at their original sign up price.
Ecommerce 2500 products plans will stay at their current price of $360 per year (or $32 monthly). We plan to explore a variety of alternative ecommerce providers in order to broaden your options for selling online.
Google PageSpeed Updates
On Monday November 12, Google released a major update to its PageSpeed testing tool, which measures the optimization and efficiency of your website. The tool now uses a new analysis engine called Lighthouse, which focuses more heavily on the real-world performance of a site (time measurements) instead of technical implementations and code tweaks.
This is part of Google’s commitment to always improving the web, and they have raised their standards significantly for sites to achieve a high PageSpeed score. After this release, Without Code users reported their mobile site PageSpeed scores dropped by 20-30 points (desktop sites are mainly unaffected). It’s important to note that your sites will not see a drop in Search Engine Rankings because of this change, they just won’t score as high when reviewed by Google’s testing tool.
Now that we can review and assess the factors that are impacting this score, changes are being implemented into the builder immediately to boost scores back up, and better align with the new testing criteria. You can expect to see performance improvements implemented over the coming weeks and months that will bump those testing scores back up to where we like to see them. This is a top priority for the team.
Read the full Google announcement here:
Engineer CMS
Our Widget Creation system “Engineer” is a project we started almost two years ago for Adobe Muse. While still a live project on our development list, we quickly realized that the Without Code platform is so much more capable than Muse and the need for Engineer was significantly diminished.
After discussion internally and with customers, we decided the project should take a back seat to other more pressing development work, such as responding to customer requested functionality and the implementation of new features on the site building platform. Changes to the web design landscape surrounding GDPR also made us revisit some of the core data storage features of Engineer, and we decided to hold it back until we had better clarity on how it fit within the Without Code brand.
We built a great tool and intend to one day capitalize on that work, but not at the expense of our core business and other more pressing opportunities. We’re currently exploring ways to reduce the complexity of the tool and make it available as a value-added service within your Without Code membership as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more information.
Upcoming Projects and Releases
- New Widgets
– our usual variety of beautiful widgets that add powerful features. Coming soon are Infiniscroll, Full Height Rows, Text / Image Combo Slider, Animated Page Transitions, Disable Right Click and a MembershipWorks integration.
- Freelancer Theme
– a general purpose theme designed for agency or portfolio sites.
- Individual “Persona” Theme
– a theme designed to showcase an individual or online resume.
- Customer Survey
– another MuseThemes tradition, keep an eye out for our year end customer survey arriving in your email within a few weeks. As usual since it’s the holiday season, we are making a donation to a children’s charity focused on giving gifts to kids in need, and we will donate an additional $1 for every completed survey.
- Core Platform Improvements
– a variety of core platform improvements are currently under development, such as a complete blog redesign, dynamic page creation system, client commenting and more connected data features.
July / Aug / Sept / Oct Recap
A breakdown of new products and benefits added to your WOC membership in the last four months:
New Widgets:
- Before and After Slider
- Facebook Feed
- Countdown Clock
- Animations
- Carousel
- SuperHero Slider
- Vimeo Video Gallery
- Tockify Calendar
- Tabbed Panel
- YouTube Video Gallery
- AddThis Social Tools
- Facebook Photo Albums
New Themes:
- OMNI
- WireFrame – Blanche
- Winery landing page
- Musician
- Church
- Electrician
Site and Builder Updates:
- Template Chooser
- Gradient Picker
- Sections: new FAQs category
- Sell on Instagram
- 21 new fonts
- Enhanced shadow controls
- Inner Rows
- Connected Data
- Navigation Content editor
Thanks again for being a member and supporter of Without Code!
Cheers,
Steve Harris
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