Weld

Your website is often the first time your prospective customers learn about your business, and first impressions are important in any business venture. A poorly designed website can quickly leave an air of amateurishness and turn off your clients. Keeping up with web design can be a difficult affair, and the rapid integration of new languages and features has created a sort of arms war for creating meaningful and current designs. Content management systems, designed to minimize the need for coding in website creation, can help streamline the process, but utilizing these often requires business owners to invest in expensive third party firms or internal design teams. Weld is designed to streamline the process of web design even further, democratizing website creation so that users can create slick and modern sites without having to learn a single line of code. When the creators of Weld decided to develop their own CMS, it was out of frustration for the currently existing options. They identified three major vectors that went into the creation of web content. These were interaction design, visual design, and interactivity. Through discussions with UX designers, they discovered that interactivity was a core component of modern websites but that the existing toolkits for creating interactive design were often overly complicated and unintuitive. They also found concerns that the tight nature of deadlines and budgeting meant that there was little opportunity to properly test concepts before implementing them. As such, Weld was built from the ground up to create a reliable and simple platform for creating interactive and dynamic content that emphasized user engagement. The end result is pretty effective. Weld takes most of the most popular functions that designers will use on their websites and tethers it to a window-based design interface that resembles existing photo and design editing software. The result is something that more closely resembles Photoshop than a traditional CMS. Most content can be created through a simple drag and drop interface, and importing your own images and content onto your site's individual pages is a painless process. Templates allow you to put a framework in place without having to start from scratch, and most of the functions you'd find in a photo editing app are available directly through an icon based toolbar. What distinguishes Weld from a lot of other CMS' is the way it takes the traditional if-else-elif structure of programming languages and incorporates them into an intuitively visual design. Creating responsive and dynamic elements is as simple as highlighting the element you want to manipulate and assigning variables to them. These could be as simple as linking out when someone clicks on a picture or animating an element on scroll over, but the highlight is the ability to string together a complex series of events. These "action blocks" allow you to set strings of conditional circumstances and facilitate complex communications between the frontend and the backend. It's an elegant approach to design that doesn't offer the full breadth of features one can achieve with coding but allows novice designers most of the tools they'll need to create dynamic content.