Do you need a website builder? Do you also need to build native apps? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could manage your content in just one CMS and it feeds both the website and the apps? And also have powerful, agency-grade customisation options?
Bondlayer takes an entirely different approach from other website building tools out there. Out of the box, it lets you create multilingual websites and when your website is done, with just a few clicks, publish it as native apps on iOS and Android. It also gives you real time filters, sorting, paginations, geolocation features, and powerful design tools such as custom breakpoints, automatic image resizing.
And then it comes with features that help
- marketing teams iterative faster freelancers and agencies improve the design process as well as collaborate with clients
- conferences and festivals send notifications to participants and show congruent content across apps and website
- exhibitions and city guides show and sort places, events
Before officially launching the service in 2021, the team behind Bondlayer worked with enterprises and large companies such as Vodafone. That’s the reason why Bondlayer has “hard features” including data filtering, pagination, reusable modules.
Pros and cons of Bondlayer
Bondlayer is a one-stop shop tool that lets you create and manage websites including native apps, and all that without coding. It comes with a template gallery combined with a visual canvas so that you can create your website and app without coding.
It supports real time filters, sorting, and pagination, push notification, geolocation, offline content (but only in the plans Business and Enterprise), and multilingual CMS and layouts.
As a cloud service, you access Bondlayer in your browser but don’t need to worry about installation or updates. Although it’s not stated anywhere on the website, you can only create one page websites.
Pros
- Reasonable pricing
- Automatic backups in all plans except Basic
- Gives you full control over the generated code
- Work in a team when you subscribe to the Team or Enterprise Plan
- Export your code – no lock-in
- Embed on your existing websites and anywhere that allows to embed code
- Easy to use
- You can use SVG files
- Setup a staging environment for your website and app
Cons
- Limited support and the community forum doesn’t seem to work
Who is Bondlayer for?
Bondlayer is a one-stop shop tool for anyone who wants to have an easy way of building and publishing native apps and websites. It’s especially great, if you want to
- have a single CMS that feeds the website and all the apps
- have a multilingual app and/or apps
- wants to allow your users to search in real time
- you want to work in a team
- you have special design needs
- you want reusable modules
- you need to send push notifications to your users
- you want to be able to export the source code and content
Although you can build a website and then publish it with a few clicks, Bondlayer is still a site builder with CMS functionality that can also deploy native apps. You need to be aware that it doesn’t (yet) have much backend workflows (or logic) to make an advanced web or mobile application. If you’re leaning more towards launching a custom app, take a look at Ycode.
How easy is Bondlayer to use?
The signup is a pleasure both because you don’t need to have your credit card at hand and also because you can uncheck the checkbox to get newsletters.
After your first login, you’re onboarded with a tutorial. If you scroll down, you’ll see that you can also jump right in by selecting a template. For all those who have ideas of their own and experience with website building tools that give you a great degree of customisability, you can also start with a blank page.
If you’re new to Bondlayer or in general just getting started, I’d suggest following the tutorial and you’ll learn in only 1 hour how to create a website, bind layouts to the data, and create all the nifty things that Bondlayer offers.
It’s also thoughtful of Bondlayer to show the editorial videos of each feature before you start to work, should you have skipped the onboarding.
It’s easy to add new elements such as text, sliders, videos, and forms. You can set global colours, shared styles, and symbols and make a library of your design pattern. This is very useful since it helps you avoid repeating yourself as well as keep your style consistent.
Even if the editor, Bondlayer calls it the visual canvas, is very powerful, it’s well designed and you’ll find it easy to learn and use.
Bondlayer templates
Templates help you get started much faster instead of being subjected to the terror of the blank page. Bondlayer’s predesigned templates are more about showcasing your work (be it as a musician or the content that a conference or a city guide would like to display)) and landing pages.
You’ll see it clearly in the templates that what you can build with Bondlayer are one page websites. The good thing is, they translate well into mobile apps.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Bondlayer?
Bondlayer itself is not designed to manage an online store. Not all is lost though. You can add a buy button into your layout or embed a service such as Ecwid by embedding it.
What marketing tools does Bondlayer provide?
You can customise site, page, and menu titles. You can set which elements of your page you want to show with the help of Open Graph. But understand that SEO for one page website is pretty limited and tough. You only have that one page to show in the search result page
Payment options
If you embed a service such as Ecwid, then payment options are included within that service.
Security
All plans offered by Bondlayer come with an SSL certificate. The plans Small, Business, and Enterprise also make automatic backups.
Customer support
Customer support is limited to the email info@bondlayer.com and the community forum. Unfortunately, the URL of the community forum was not found when I tried to browse it. You may want to try to reach them via Facebook or Twitter.
Pricing
You can try out Bondlayer for free and only need to subscribe to a paying plan when you want to publish your project. It offers plans for freelancers and can scale with you. Beware that Bondlayer limits the monthly visits according to the plan you’ve chosen
Is Bondlayer the right solution for you?
Regardless of the size of your company, if you want to publish a multilingual website and/or native apps, Bondlayer makes it easy for you. You can write and maintain your content in one CMS and you get consistent content on your website and apps.
It comes with features that you won’t find elsewhere such as real time search, dynamic filtering and sorting, alerts, and geolocation.
That being said, if you want a multi page website, Bondlayer is not for you. Since it’s a new service, this may change in the future.
Original post here: Bondlayer review
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