A Look Back and a Look Ahead - 2021 Year in Review

Now that we’re nicely settled into 2022, we’re taking stock of 2021 and planning the upcoming months. First, a major thank-you to our entire community for all of your support – we are so grateful to be a part of your business process and don’t take that responsibility lightly.

2021 was a year of behind-the-scenes work rebuilding our foundation to ensure we offer the best experience to members and have the necessary base to build Without Code into what we always imagined it will be. With this structure now firmly in place we will spend this year focused on new developments including highly requested features, widgets, templates and resources.

Read on for a review at what 2021 brought, updates on some major projects, and a look at what’s to come in 2022.

New Dashboard and Billing System Update

A few months ago, we launched our new and improved dashboard. This massive development project had been in the works since early 2021 and entailed a complete rebuild/redesign of our core platform including our billing system.

We undertook this challenge to improve your experience and address customer requests and issues that had come in over the years. This rebuild was also an essential part of our future planning, as it enables us to expand and add value to your membership.

If you haven’t yet transitioned to this new dashboard, a few of the benefits that you can expect:

• Dramatically faster
• A project-centric approach to make it easier to organize and search sites/services
• Publish (bug free) directly from your dashboard
• Plans are now easy to upgrade and downgrade
• Ability to enable Flex mode
• Simplified billing through Stripe
  

There have been some questions circling the community, so we want to address those here along with the status of the dashboard. First, we’re continuing to run both the new dashboard and the old dashboard to ensure this transition is as seamless as possible. This means you can use the old dashboard to manage your existing sites and the new one to create new sites.

Second, we just released our complete migration tool which means that you can now migrate all sites over. We’ll continue to run both dashboards in tandem for a while to ensure everyone is comfortable but will eventually close the old one altogether – at that point you will need to migrate all sites to the new one. There have been fears expressed over migrating sites (which we totally understand; these sites are critical to your business, and you’re concerned over losing work/upsetting clients) but rest assured, there is ZERO risk to migrating sites. We are not moving your site anywhere, it's simply a database entry update.

We’re very excited about the new dashboard and billing system! This is going to improve your experience, remove some of the bugs you’ve dealt with in the past, and most notably, this was an essential step in our plans for expanding Without Code. Read more about the new dashboard here.

Flex Update

After months of beta testing Flex, we released this new mode at the very end of 2021. Flex is now available on new sites on our new dashboard* at no additional cost and allows you to design responsive sections and pages, a feature not previously possible in Without Code.

Essentially, Flex gives you design freedom with no compromises. The fluid layouts adjust by breakpoint, so you have complete control over how your site looks regardless of which device site visitors are using and the ability to design freeform means you can drag and drop anywhere you want for complete customization. As Without Code has always operated within a rows/columns structure, this mode is a welcome addition for many designers craving some freedom.

Read our Flex documentation to find out how to enable and use this new mode. We’re very excited to see what you whip up with this new capability!

*If you want to try Flex on an old site, email our support team and they can enable this for you.

New Widgets, Features, and Resources

Comparison Blog Posts

We published four comparison posts for the following major platforms: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow. In previous year’s surveys, you helped us identify the other platforms you were using besides Without Code, and you also told us that you struggle to argue against using other platforms with your clients. We created these posts to help you sell customers on Without Code; we hope these give you some great arguments!

Live Chat

Currently available on the new dashboard, we launched live chat at the tail end of 2021 to help you with any technical issues immediately. This highly requested feature is one we’ll be expanding in 2022 with more hours and agents so we can help you get solutions to any Without Code issue immediately.

Media Drive

We released Media Drive in early 2021 as a lightning-fast media hosting and file storage service integrated right into your dashboard. Media Drive offers hosting for videos and photos that allows galleries and widgets to run faster than ever. In addition to media streaming, it offers a great solution for storage of media, files, or custom code that can be easily added to your websites.

Media Drive is free to all members with up to 50MB of storage and you can purchase 1GB for $49/year. If you haven’t started using Media Drive yet, find out how to take advantage now!

New Widgets

• FX Series: Released on an accelerated pace over the course of several months, the new FX series takes an all-new approach to widgets. These streamlined widgets offer a single, dedicated effect intended to add visual appeal and interest to your site.
• FX – Ken Burns
• FX – Gradients
• FX – Bokeh
• FX – Frost
• FX – Button Hover
• FX – Button Line Hover
• FX – Confetti
• Mega Menu: A highly requested widget and our first release of 2021, Mega Menu was a huge build (it took 6 months to develop, test, and polish). This immensely powerful navigation widget is capable of large-scale menus for sites with categories, product catalogs or large page counts.
• Directory Gallery
• Cinematic Slider
• Floating Gallery
• MemberSpace Widget
• Row Scroll Gallery
• Video Scroll Motion
• Media Gallery
• Custom Social Icons
  

New Templates

• Poke Restaurant
• Renovation & Construction
• Prairie Animal Clinic
• Online Education
• Nutritionist
• Dental Clinic
• Bakery
• Home Fitness
• Legal Firm

And..

• 19 new sections
• 12 new popups
  

Upcoming Projects and Plans

Business Directory

This has been in production for many months and we’re looking forward to releasing this heavy hitter. This widget displays a large directory of listings (businesses, services, homes, etc.) with a detached sidebar that includes a multi-level filter, categories, tags, search, and sort.

FX Series Part 2

Our first series of FX widgets were very popular, and we’ve gotten requests for more. We’re coming back with another rapid-release round of FX widgets that include text effects, new background patterns, and highlighter effects.

Business Resources

These resources include guides, tips, and free downloadable handouts to tackle some of your most time consuming (and perhaps your most irritating) business tasks. We’ve gotten lots of comments from members on the things that hold up their productivity; using this feedback we’ve already created several resources and plan to do many more.

Head to our blog to check our existing resources:

• Content Collection Guide + Free Questionnaire
• Pre and Post Launch Guide + Free Checklist
• Design Proposals Guide + Free Template
• Design Project Contract Guide + Free Template

Integrated Third Party Apps

We’re excited to integrate powerful new services this year and are exploring partnerships with a variety of third-party providers. The plan is to roll out an app store filled with a variety of leading edge tools to address your feature requests, such as membership sites, accessibility, privacy / GDPR compliance and more. Stay tuned for the app store, launching in Q2 2022!

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As always, thank you for supporting Without Code – we're excited for 2022.

Mackenzie Petursson
Team WOCode