2022-01-28

Startup by Designmodo: Easiest way to create a landing page!

Startup by Designmodo is a block based website generator. A block based website generator allows you to assemble a website from a library of predesigned design elements. There are about a dozen of pre-built components which you can utilize to create your pages. All these components are well designed and modern enabling you ti quickly build a landing page for your service in minutes. This is a really useful tool for people who have no or less coding experiences to quickly launch a website.

Component Library

Startup consists of various components like Header, Navigation, Blogs, Pricing and other useful components each having about 10 to 20 variations in both light and dark modes. This would be enough for a startup company to quickly build an MVP. Even though Startup includes components like login and signup forms, e commerce listing, forms etc, it is not straight forward to setup for an inexperienced person without technical background. It must be noted that Startup provides only the front-end functionality and the user have to make arrangements for any back-end functions. Components for E commerce listings must be hard coded as Startup does not provide any content management systems of any sort or any integrations for the same.

Customizability

Let's admit it. When it comes to design, the choice of the crowd is worst. Hence most design products will leave no or very little room for the end user to screw up. When it comes to customizability, Startup lags a lot behind user expectations. There are features that helps the user to fine tune existing components and elements but their functionality is limited. The designers at Startup has limited this functionality to prevent users from tearing up their design. This is actually a good thing as the end user has little room to make terrible design mistakes.

The editor experience

Startup has a well built and pleasing website editor. However, do not be surprised when you come across minor bugs here and there. The user interface is great, but the user experience is below average. It might take a while for you to figure out how to create a new page or reorder components in your page. Throw your intuitions to the dustbin as they do not work here. You cannot drag and drop components nor drag to reorder.

Hosting

Startup lets you download your project folder and host it ourselves. Designmodo also provides a static hosting service. You can also host your website on their platform.

Pricing

There is no free tier on Startup. You get access to all the features for a trial period of 14 days. After which you have to subscribe to either their basic business plan of $199 per year billed annually. The basic plan allows only 20 exports per month. So if you are serious, business plan is not serious enough. Their agency plan is a premium version allowing unlimited exports. It costs around $249 per year when billed annually.

What does the exported website look like

The website is built on top of bootstrap and will import their custom css, most of which would be unused by your website. The website also uses jQuery. Animations are achieved by the "AOS" animation library.

Form integrations

As mentioned above, there is only front-end support for forms. In their documentations here. They do mention the steps to create a php server to accept form submissions and provide appropriate responses on Telegram, Viber, Mailchimp etc. They do provide some code samples in the documentation in the form of "images", as they couldn't figure out how to make the lives of the users more comfortable.