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alien-nibb
New Pleskian
The web Presence Builder is a great idea. Congrats Parallels, at last you realized there is a huge market of providers that need a product like this, which is platform agnostic.
There are self hosted sitebuilders out, but to be honest, they are awful in quality and the ones that are great, like Webnode, etc, are all self hosted, not available for services providers.
The minute I saw this product is available for cPanel and other products as standalone I purchased it for testing. The reason is I want a product like this which is not bundled only for a specific platform like Plesk, but works regardless of the control panel or hosting platform server.
Here are some suggestions which I think should be addressed in a future released, this are very simple to integrate, so I see why not:
1. The shopping cart option is not really an option since the its only for EcWid. This is counter productive for services providers for several reasons. Ecwid is not multilanguage, and Parallels products are, so they are used internationally, if that is your case, then the Ecwid option is useless for the customers. Its ok to promote a third party service, but this counter productive for service providers which offer ecommerce services, and want to offer their own services or are promoting their own partner for this. This module is useless like this. Its just a link to third party service. It should have another option, let providers use their own option or integrate some open source basic shopping cart right into the product, there are tons of amazing options out.
2. I like the idea that templates can be imported, this means professional web templates could be custom made and upload into the system. Parallels should try to setup a market for this or at least provide some basic templates. In order to compete today, the product should include 50 to 100 professional templates. This is what customers look for and what sells them. A company like Parallels could hire some web designers for this but currently as it ships its very poor in designs. Even while the GUI and software could be amazed, users will not use it if they are not sold by a nice design they see. This products are targeted at newbie, non web designers, and what sells them is the mental picture of a nice visual design which can be their future website.
3. Image editor. A product like this will never be complete without letting users have a basic image editor in the system. The biggest problem newbie users have, is images, their website could look amazing, but their images don´t, putting a build image editor for basic crop, resize, effects, etc, would make the output of their websites way professional and Parallels does not to code this either. There are amazing online editors available like fotoflexer, pixlr, lunapic, you name it. Let the provider configure which one they want to use, then put a icon to edit the image in the toolbar, which uses the API or sends the image to the external online editor, when pulls the result back. This is not hard. Of course better would be a build in HTML 5 image editor, this would be even better.
4. Modules, let service providers build their own modules. Instead of everyone providing a boxed product with all the same features, let providers extend the product if they want with their own modules or build in functionality, this will allow them to build models targeting their service and market. Someone may be heavy into social things, and another provider into coding, so one could add their own extra social modules, etc.
This are basic suggestions, so far the product feels very clean, fast and nice.
There are self hosted sitebuilders out, but to be honest, they are awful in quality and the ones that are great, like Webnode, etc, are all self hosted, not available for services providers.
The minute I saw this product is available for cPanel and other products as standalone I purchased it for testing. The reason is I want a product like this which is not bundled only for a specific platform like Plesk, but works regardless of the control panel or hosting platform server.
Here are some suggestions which I think should be addressed in a future released, this are very simple to integrate, so I see why not:
1. The shopping cart option is not really an option since the its only for EcWid. This is counter productive for services providers for several reasons. Ecwid is not multilanguage, and Parallels products are, so they are used internationally, if that is your case, then the Ecwid option is useless for the customers. Its ok to promote a third party service, but this counter productive for service providers which offer ecommerce services, and want to offer their own services or are promoting their own partner for this. This module is useless like this. Its just a link to third party service. It should have another option, let providers use their own option or integrate some open source basic shopping cart right into the product, there are tons of amazing options out.
2. I like the idea that templates can be imported, this means professional web templates could be custom made and upload into the system. Parallels should try to setup a market for this or at least provide some basic templates. In order to compete today, the product should include 50 to 100 professional templates. This is what customers look for and what sells them. A company like Parallels could hire some web designers for this but currently as it ships its very poor in designs. Even while the GUI and software could be amazed, users will not use it if they are not sold by a nice design they see. This products are targeted at newbie, non web designers, and what sells them is the mental picture of a nice visual design which can be their future website.
3. Image editor. A product like this will never be complete without letting users have a basic image editor in the system. The biggest problem newbie users have, is images, their website could look amazing, but their images don´t, putting a build image editor for basic crop, resize, effects, etc, would make the output of their websites way professional and Parallels does not to code this either. There are amazing online editors available like fotoflexer, pixlr, lunapic, you name it. Let the provider configure which one they want to use, then put a icon to edit the image in the toolbar, which uses the API or sends the image to the external online editor, when pulls the result back. This is not hard. Of course better would be a build in HTML 5 image editor, this would be even better.
4. Modules, let service providers build their own modules. Instead of everyone providing a boxed product with all the same features, let providers extend the product if they want with their own modules or build in functionality, this will allow them to build models targeting their service and market. Someone may be heavy into social things, and another provider into coding, so one could add their own extra social modules, etc.
This are basic suggestions, so far the product feels very clean, fast and nice.
