"Normal People" Need to Create Websites, Too: Zimplit
This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is a resource and guide for first-time entrepreneurs and startups. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.
Zimplit is the "open source web creation tool for dummies," according to Mattias Lepp, the company's executive leader. "Our team doesn't know anything about the web and software. Oliver Pulges is chemist, Silver Sikk is philologist, and I am old music orchestra conductor. This gives us unique advantage to see and make software for normal people, not for programmers."
As commerce, socialization, creativity, and identity become increasingly digitized and uploaded, the number of non-technical, "normal people" who need free, simple web design solutions increases. And for allowing non-techies to create quick, customizable, easily editable pages, Zimplit is a good resource. If you're too skilled for tools like Zimplit, keep it in your back pocket for the next time someone asks you to build a website and you'd really rather not.
Here's how Zimplit works: The user picks a name and password, a template, and is redirected to a page with text, links, images, and the Zimplit toolbar, a tiny, 12-button wonder with options to redo/undo, modify text settings, add or change links, insert images or other objects, and dive into the source code itself. The page is immediately editable in the browser using the toolbar, no software install required.
It's simpler still when users choose to buy their own domain, hosting, and email through Zimplit. Otherwise, the Zimplit file needs to be installed on the user's server of choice.
Here's a look at the template I chose with the toolbar and the code window:
Using the Zimplit toolbar was instant, and that was awesome. There wasn't the traditional process of installing and learning the software, creating the files, editing them, saving them, copying to an FTP site, etc. Changes appeared live on the web as they were saved in the Zimplit program.
Editing within the browser was incredibly easy, as well. The Zimplit toolbar is intuitive and simple. It even allowed to me to add YouTube videos, images, and a Google search bar with a single click. There's also an option to run scripts from the "add items" button in the toolbar.
After a half hour of messing around, this is what I had come up with. It wasn't earth-shattering, but it was clean and functional. Most importantly, it was quick, easy, and free. We can imagine that nonprofits, individuals, and small businesses with small budgets could turn this into a great tool. If Zimplit were put in the hands of a creative, slightly knowledgeable person with a little more time than I had, he or she could create a sweet little masterpiece.
The Zimplit button was a planned improvement last month from the Zimplit team and ended up being source of some consternation for us. We couldn't get the button to function as a Firefox or IE add-on; apparently, it would make the editing process even easier, allowing a user to navigate to his live site, click the button, and instantly go into editing mode from the same browser. The mind reels! But as aforementioned, we were unable to test the button ourselves.
As could be reasonably expected with almost any startup offering, the UI is still a bit buggy, with text jumping around or buttons/cursors not working as one might expect. Text selection is weird, and we couldn't figure out how to delete images or videos we'd inserted without going into the code.
For nondesigners who'd like to play with the templates a bit, it would be nice to have a simple palette tool to change background and text colors. Also, being able to change the font family and size from the toolbar would be great; to make these changes, we had to open up the code window yet again.
On the whole, Zimplit is a great, affordable solution for non-technical folks who need websites. It's lightweight, and browser-as-website-editor is a fantastic concept in general.
Another point that Lepp emphasized was that the code for Zimplit itself "is incredibly simple. Every HTML enthusiast can make new design templates and widgets for it." It would be truly great to see a "widget store" for Zimplit, particularly if the widgets were presented in uniform themes and sizes for each web template.
Finally, Zimplit on its website calls itself a content management system; we weren't able to see those functions. This might be a part of the paid functions to which we didn't have access.
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i'd like to participate in your readwritestart channel but i'm totally and categorically opposed to anything related to or affiliated to microsoft. i run GNU/Linux. i reckon i'll just have to avoid readwritestart. cya
P.S. ... zimplit is open source. haha, take that microsoft. thanks for sponsoring this channel.
Sadly the more people there are like sexyofie, the less likely organizations like RWW will be able to sustain themselves. Great work there.
Cool. Open source is the future, I think.
Well-written article!
Zimplit seems really interesting. Perfect tool for web designers.
@SexySofie - You seem to have mistaken this for a political blog.
@Chris - Thanks for stopping by, stranger! And I'm glad you like this one. I think openness in general - open source, open logins, open data - is definitely the wave of the present, where the Internet is concerned.
To no one in particular, I will say that many major software/hardware/web giants who've been around for years and even decades are doing really interesting things for startups. Yahoo!, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel - it's silly to think that these corporations would be able to maintain in the current economic and technological realities without giving resources to and try to gain some insight from the current wave of web/app developers. I've talked to a lot of people across the country, from fiercely independent developers to execs at the aforementioned megacompanies themselves; I can only conclude that traditional IT generalizations that divide users and developers into polarized camps are rather useless when applied to today's paradigm. Those ideologies benefit no one.
It looks easy and simple, but lacks some totally rudimentary text-editing features like:
* forward delete (the del-key!)
* keyboard selection of text (using shift-arrow-keys or shift-home)
* home/end cursor movement
* support for arrow-up!
* a cursor that doesn't take space
* and so on...
I'm sorry for being so negative, but this really is unusable as it is right now.
And for being new and revolutionary: similar systems were around over 5 years ago.
Lon Boonen
@Lon - I would like to see something similar. Can you paste some links? I have been working with content management systems ower 8 years and can say that Zimplit is quite unique. True, there is some problems but the idea is fantastic.
For sure, Zimplit template system is brilliant. You can turn any HTML page to editable template. I really like it.
@mel
I just looked it up. November 2001 we released a long since abandonded product called LIME (Less Is More Editor). You could place special attributes in some HTML page and effectively make it a template that way. Users could only edit/copy/move those attributed parts of the page, keeping them away from the styling/navigation/non-content parts. All of this was done using WYSIWYG editing, in-line/page. All structural changes (move, insert, delete of blocks) were animated, of course. IE5.5 only (at that time). I can send you the zip file if you like. Mail me (lon at q42.nl).
Around that time you also had RedDot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedDot) and Ektron. The latter excelled in uglyness and sheer number of buttons (/personal opinion).
Zimplit looks nice. But needs polishing and is a bit late. Still. There might be a market for it. At the time we tried there wasn't. At least not for us.
Thanks looks positive and logical
I didn't try this "Zimplit" thing, but it seems interesting. A it is open source! Very encouraging! But still, I stick to Joomla :-)
But for these days, is there still any interest in making website like back then in Web 1.0 for the normal peoples ?
Compared to using hosted services.
@Lon
Most of old Europe (Italy, Spain and Germany) are using plain HTML pages and I think that there is today big market for products like this. Companies who have old HTML pages can add one script and make page editable without extra investment.
Nice to see this new open source web creation tool. Its really easy to create a website with Zimplit and there design are awesome. Thanks.
Nice Tool
"Normal" people should avoid these site builders and use wordpress ;)
Seriously - if you can use (and doubtless get frustrated by) a sitebuilding tool -you can fire up wordpress, hosted for free by the good WP people, or with 1 click install on a cheap/free webhost - its even easier than google sites if ya ask me ;)
Over and out!
I can't wait to try this. These are the kind of neat tools that make the Web so much fun and promote the open environment. Thanks for posting!
Zimplit's home page claims that more than 87,000 people are using it, yet a Google search for "Powered by Zimplit" got only 112 hits. Most of those were one-page test sites that looked abandoned.
How do I locate the other 86,888 users, who must have paid the $49 to remove the powered-by branding from their web pages?
I'd like to browse their sites to see how they are implementing this CMS.
(This sounds more snide then I meant it to. Sorry.)
Definitely a helpful tool for non technical people who wants to build a website. Tried out the demo and its pretty easy to use.
Its really easy to create a website with Zimplit and there design are awesome.
hi this website so much good then other website u can see a lots of channel online.You can enjoy more than 3000 tv channels.please logon here and enjoy.
I Like this website so much. You Can enjoy more than 3000 tv channels at one place.I Enjoy this website if You want to enjoy this website then logon this website http://www.Tvchannelsheaven.com
Most of the guys here stated good reason for using Zimplit. But I would Agree with the guy named Product who sticks to Joomla! I also use Joomla, and I would not change it for anything else. Even Alex -S- said that Wordpress is good, and I'd agree, but it all depends what you intend to do. If your site is about to be some personal web site, than Zimplit does a perfect job. But if you try to make something more complex than not even Wordpress would be enough. It just depends on your needs. But I give a Zimplit thumbs up. It is really promising!