Member Update – March 2019
It’s hard to believe Without Code is almost one year old – and what a year it’s been! In the last 12 months our team has learned so much about your needs and the challenges modern designers face. With that said, it’s time to update you, our partners and customers, on the state of our business and share our plans for the future.
Please note that plans and priorities are subject to change.
Opening Thoughts
Platform longevity and stability is a major decision factor for designers building client sites, and I’m happy to report our business is in great shape! Our customer base is growing at a very healthy rate, and existing members are publishing more and more sites on the platform each day. As we continue to grow, we will expand our team accordingly, adding more support, development and design resources that will increase the value of your membership significantly.
As of this writing we're powering over 15,000 sites and approaching our first year of renewals for sites published in April 2018. Successful renewals are crucial for a business like ours to grow, and we’re laser focused on expanding the platform to ensure we’re your website creation tool of choice for many years to come.
As always, we love to hear your feedback. If there’s something we’re doing exceptionally well – or could be doing much better – please don’t hesitate to send a note to info@wocode.com.
Enterprise Membership
Our Enterprise membership is now open for applications – click here to apply!
You’re probably wondering why we’re taking applications instead of direct signups. We decided to approach Enterprise in this way because this is a resource-intensive membership tier that we need to roll out carefully.
In order to offer a high level of support, we need to limit the plan to a smaller group of customers at first. Pro members who are very comfortable on the platform and have published multiple sites already will be given first priority, and as we assess the staffing requirements to support this tier, we’ll open up more slots.
If you are interested in Enterprise, please don’t hesitate to apply – we’ll be sure to keep all applications on file and notify customers as soon as more spots are available.
Release Communication
For the past year we’ve sent users a weekly email updating them on what’s new in the platform. While we don’t plan on slowing down our release process, we are going to throttle back on the number of emails we’re sending announcing new updates. Users are frequently reporting they can’t keep up with this high volume of releases, and they are finding themselves searching back through old emails to see what’s been added.
Going forward we’re going to release new platform features and widgets as soon as they are ready, rather than trickling them out week by week (typically on Wednesdays). We’ll shift our focus to maintaining a detailed Update Log
page on the site, which users can check on periodically to see what’s new.
We’ll also send bigger “round up” emails that detail all the new products and platform improvements in one comprehensive update. Truthfully, we spend a ton of time and resources sending emails weekly, and we think that effort is better spent building out the platform and adding new products.
If you don’t hear from us for a couple weeks, it certainly doesn't mean there’s nothing new to report. We’re probably just building something big and very cool that needs a little more TLC.
Check on our Update Log
anytime to see what’s new – this will always be updated immediately when we add a new feature.
Free vs. Pro Membership Changes
In order to add more value to our Pro membership offering, we’re going to be making the following changes:
- Templates
– the bulk of our Free templates will now move into the Pro membership tier. Free members will have access to a smaller limited selection of themes designed to encourage platform exploration.
- Widgets
– going forward several of our new widgets will be restricted to the Pro membership tier. These include the MuseThemes “Connect” series widgets, which are powered by Google Sheets, and our upcoming search widget.
- 3rd Party Discounts
– we’ve been exploring adding additional services to Without Code through various 3rd parties and outside partnerships. This includes an entirely new business we’ve been working on (see below). These discounts will be made available to Pro or higher-level accounts.
ThemePhotos.com
As template designers, we’ve always struggled to find stock photography. Finding one photo is easy but finding a complete set of 20+ consistent photos (enough to build a full website) is incredibly difficult. Back in late 2014 we bought the domain ThemePhotos.com
to “scratch our own itch” as they say, yet we never managed to kick this new business off.
Over the past six months we began building ThemePhotos behind the scenes, and we’re proud to announce that the site and business will launch in the next few weeks. Our initial launch will include 12 professionally shot and produced packs of photos, each geared towards a specific business type or industry. Each pack is offered at $59.99 (for a minimum of 20 super high-resolution photos) or through an unlimited access membership priced at $199 per year.
Discounts will be available for existing MuseThemes and Without Code Pro / Enterprise members. We have an aggressive release calendar planned, and several shoots currently in progress – this library is going to grow fast! We're also interested in purchasing photo sets from outside photographers, so if you or someone you know would like details on submitting content please drop us a line! (info@themephotos.com).
Stay tuned for our official launch announcement.
Billing Update – Site IDs on Receipts
We’ve updated our billing system to include Site ID numbers on new subscription receipts. This makes it easier to reference which site is associated with that receipt.
This addition was not backwards compatible and unfortunately is not available for existing subscriptions. However, any site purchased going forward will now reference both the Subscription ID and the Site ID on each payment receipt.
Upcoming Projects and Releases
Here’s a quick look at our plans and priorities for the next few months. To see what we’ve released in the last few months, check out our release log here.
- Tutorials
– April is going to be “Education Month” with us placing a major focus on building extensive tutorial resources, launching a new getting started webinar, and preparing general business resources for designers (contract templates, quote forms, etc.).
- New Widgets / Themes
– a slick batch of new widgets and themes is on deck. These include Document Viewer, Count-Up, Parallax Effects, Preloaders and Disable Right Click (released today).
- Site Search
– a heavy hitter, our new Site Search widget is powered by Google Sheets. We took this approach so that users had superior control over their search results.
- Blog Update – another heavy hitter, the new blog system is available for new blogs, and we're working on a system to transition old blogs to the new system.
Thanks again for being a member and supporter of Without Code!
Cheers,
Steve Harris
More from Without Code
The sun is out, the weather’s still warm, and we’re building stuff! We've added six new builder features that can benefit you in creating icon consistency in your designs, reducing stress when restoring site backups, building more powerful Media Sliders, and much more.
Page Builder helps you build or mock up pages in your site quickly. By generating page structures using pre-designed sections, you can get a feel for a page layout as fast as your mind can imagine it. And when you can generate pages quickly, you can finish full sites quickly.
Spring has sprung! We thought it would be the perfect time to report on a roundup of user-requested features, including improvements to global styling, a great new feature for mobile sites, a Flex update and a cool new function for a classic widget.
The latest addition to the Without Code site builder brings us into an all new territory of AI-assisted design. AI Generated Sections take a few simple text prompts and turn them into fully-designed sections, complete with images, headlines and paragraph text.
