We’ve had a few posts on ok cool about SimpleWeb and I’ve been asked a few times what’s it all about, so here goes.
SimpleWeb Ltd was set up by Tom and Mark earlier this year to fill a few gaps in the now quite mature website creation market.
The first of these is the “my friend makes websites, he’ll do it for you for a few hundred quid” type sites. More often than not for a small business these turn into an absolute disaster. Your mate’s mate creates you an ok looking website in about four weeks, sticks it on Fasthosts (GoDaddy, etc), charges you three hundred quid and then disappears into the ether. When you want a page changed or a new email address; if you can find him (or her), they’ll charge you a silly amount and take two weeks to do it. Sounds familiar?
As SimpleWeb we figured that we could remedy this.
Let’s create the simplest online “page editor” that we possibly can, offer full hosting, email, domain name, a few getting started guides and offer it as a package for a fixed easy to swallow fee.
Small business’s get a quality product that’s future proof, easy to update (themselves), affordable and still get a certain level of support they could never get from “your mate’s mate”.
So far we feel that we are delivering on this promise and have a fair few happy customers. Our “page editor” is becoming quite sophisticated and is already doing things that nobody else seems to be doing, it’s still early days and currently only works in Firefox, but it is progressing nicely. Tom and his super techyness has even solved a problem that the clever people at Tiny MCE couldn’t, allowing almost perfect wysiwyg in a browser; which we should see added into Tiny MCE distribution in the future…
The only problem with this process driven solution is the design stage, no matter how much a client is paying, whether it’s £500 or £5000, it still has to look and feel right for the client… If we offer them a template, they feel that their individuality has been comprised. If we completely custom design from scratch we affect our profitability. The solution here we feel is in the law of averages and clever code and XHTML management.
The other main gap that we see is for freelance designers and small to medium sized agencies, but I think that I’ve written enough for now, I’ll save that for another post…
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The TinyMCE editor really is an excellent editor but unfortunately with any of these WYSIWYG editors (with the exception of a few really expensive Java ones) the `I` seems to stand for isn’t! So… *W*hat *Y*ou *S*ee “*I*sn’t” *W*hat *Y*ou *G*et. It’s unfortunate, but this is actually down to a fairly major limitation in the AllowEditable functionality of Mozilla browsers, meaning they all need to put the content in to an iFrame.
Mark has perhaps slightly over stated what I’ve done with the editor to try and solve this issue because I think it’s more likely that the vendors don’t see it as an issue. I hope the TinyMCE developers will work on the problem of making what you see when editing more like the end result when the content is in the page. We have a few more ideas and tricks up our sleeves to further improve the editing experience, and, with any SimpleWeb, all of our existing customers will get this update for free.