Even in the age of social media it still makes sense to run your own website. It can be summarised in 2 words: Control and freedom. On a personal level, you probably don’t want to send potential employers or customers to your Bereal or Tumblr page. And on a professional level, you want to have control over what you sell and how you’re going to deliver it to your customers. Lastly, a dedicated website just looks more authoritative if not trustworthy, especially if you want to showcase your experience and skills.
Building a website doesn’t require an arm and a leg so that you can employ a designer and developer team. On the other hand, it also doesn’t take ages for yourself to build it if you’re armed with knowledge of servers and other web development wizardry. Especially if you value design and customisability, a new breed of services make it super simple for you to design and publish your website without any code. Meet Siter.
Siter is a no code website builder specially for designers and people who like to use tools such as Figma. Powerful tools that give freedom and control in how you design your websites. Siter is powerful because it has a gallery of countless free icons and right within its interface, you can search for royalty-free and high quality images of Unsplash. It also lets you insert custom code, embed videos, and import your design from Figma. You can also set up a design system so that you can re-use colours, and font styles on all pages of a project.
Siter is another project launched by the team of Desigmodo who also built Slides5 and Startup. Even though launching website builders isn’t a new thing for the team, it took almost four years. But that’s because Siter is feature-rich. You get really useful features such as history changes, SVG editing, and realtime collaboration where you can work with your teammates like if you’re in the same room. Siter is a new service, it completed its bet phase in July 2022.
Pros and cons of Siter
Siter is an online service for designers and people used to working with tools like Figma to design and publish websites. In contrast to Figma, the result you get is a ready-to-use site that you can connect to your custom domain, not just an image.
Pros
- Clear and uncluttered interface so that it’s easy to use
- Collaborate with your teammates
- Figma plugin lets you import your Figma designs directly
- Gallery of free icons
- Built-in integration with Unsplash
Cons
- No free forever plan (although the pricing is fair)
- Only 4 page templates as yet but since Siter is a young service, the template gallery may still grow
Who is Siter for?
If you work regularly with Figma, be it as a designer or developer, with Siter, you can design in the cloud and create website seamlessly. You design in the browser, freehand, and instead of an image, the finished result is a ready-to-use site.
This means Siter is a useful tool for your toolbelt if you’re working as a freelancer or running an agency. It allows your team to work together, even if they’re working remote or the offices are in different locations.
How easy is Siter to use?
When you create your account, you just need to fill in the page title and description then choose a template. No need for a credit card, and also no endless questions. After your first login, you’ll see the dashboard with an overview of all your projects and you should see your first one
Click on your project to see the project details. On the detail view of your project, you can add pages, teammates, forms, and define additional settings.
To change the design and add more content, click on the page you want to work on. Even if you don’t know tools like Figma (yet), don’t feel intimidated. The editor is a piece of cake to use.
All in all, the Designmodo team built a clear and easy to use tool that bundles everything a UI or web designer would need. It’s flexible yet easy to learn and use.
Design and templates
The templates are designed for pages. This means, each page can have a different layout. You can use one of the templates or start with a blank page.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Siter?
Siter is more like a design tool that automatically generates the HTML and other code when you design your sites. It’s not built to manage an online store.
Since you can add custom code to a page, you can embed a service such as Ecwid by adding custom HTML code.
Integrations
Out of the gates, Siter is integrated with Unsplash. Just look at the image tool in the editor. You can upload your own images or click on the Unsplash button.
You can add services such as Google Analytics or Bing Webmaster by adding custom code to your your website project’s HTML header section. You can also embed Google Maps and other services that provided embeddable code and widgets by adding the code snippets as custom code to your pages.
What marketing tools does Siter provide?
You can add forms to your site to collect email addresses.
Payment options
If want accept payments, you can add a Paypal or Stripe button, by embedding the code into your pages
Security
All plans include an SSL certificate. You can transfer ownership of a project to your client
Customer support
If you got a question, you can find the help icon in the left menu at the bottom. A click brings up the searchable help. If you question is not answered, you also have the option to chat with the support team. They usually answer within 24 hours on Monday to Friday.
Pricing
You can start for and experience for yourself how it is to use Siter for free. Strangely enough, it’s not stated anywhere on the website how long the free trial period will be. Siter offers 3 plans that all have the same features except Agency that also gives you free sites.io subdomains.
Is Siter the right solution for you?
Just like any other service, Siter comes with its own set of strengths and shortcomings. Siter is very easy to use with a clear and intuitive interface especially if you know Figma already. It’s really great if you work with Figma as its plugin can import your designs.
But, Siter is more like a static site generator just like the other services launched by Designmodo. This means, you don’t get tools to create advanced web apps. For that you’ll need something like Ycode.
Siter is also not for you if you want to run a large and complex online store. Then you’d be happier with something like Bigcommerce or Magento.
As a young service, the team of Siter will regularly add new features and kill off bugs. You can also suggest features and may see them in a future release.
Original post here: Siter review
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