Weld Blog - Diary of a Startup

So cool

Starting today, we have a slightly modified pricing for Weld:

$1/month gives you unlimited screens/pages per project. Free users have 3 screens/pages per project.

Beckmans students create innovative responsive designs, havoc

Tom from Weld visited Beckmans College of Design today and held a workshop for the second year students.

The students got the task to create “innovative solutions for responsive design” - which they did. Completely. With a big emphasis on “innovative”.

Be blown away by Ella’s “punk rock” responsive site, or Laurens’ minimalistic illustrations made entirely from Weld shapes (see image above). Or try to find the hidden message in Kalle’s flowery Illuminati site.

Introducing the Weld Gallery

Our vision for Weld is not only a tool, but a social platform where you can be inspired, exchange ideas, and find collaborators.

Today we’re updating Weld with a new navigational menu.

It’s a bit more conventional than our previous design, but the new system will hopefully make it easier to explore Weld.

Today we’re migrating Weld to a new, more scalable platform, powered by Firebase. It’s the result of man-monts of work, and this will enable all sorts of cool features in the future, including real-time collaboration. It also makes Weld almost infinitely scalable.

What you’ll see in this upgrade:

Proper links for sub pages. No more “www.mywebsite.com/3”, now your pages get the sub page from the page/screen title, e.g. “Contact” becomes “www.mywebsite.com/contact”.

UI updates to project list and screen list.

Lots of small bug fixes.

But also, it’s big upgrade, and although we have tested it thoroughly, some small snag might slip through. Keep us posted if you find anything weird.

Marcus Tonndorf is an experienced entrepreneur and angel investor. For his latest project, Hexlox, he chose Weld to build the landing page.

Tell us about yourself and your background as entrepreneur

It all started with web design. Back in 1995, I founded a small webstudio called Peeloot Interactive in Stockholm. Later, I left for London where I studied Design & Branding.

After having opened the Berlin office of design studio Pentagram, I set out on my true entrepreneurial journey starting companies in Berlin, Munich and Tokyo and then back to Berlin where my latest venture is located.

During the years I’ve also done seed rounds with selected ventures and I also mentor a selected few.

What is Hexlox?

Hexlox is the worlds smallest lock, designed to protect your bike saddle, wheels and any components that are fasten with a bolt. You can install it in a second and its removed with a personal key.

Once installed no-one can loosen your bolts or open your screws. With all your parts protected its also very unattractive for the thief to take the whole bike.

It has been tested with German Lockpicking Association who could not open it and as one large bike shop in Berlin said: “A true innovation. Small, light and incredibly safe. It will be hard to do something better than this”.

Hexlox inventor Ian (left) with Marcus (right).

Why did you pick Weld for the website?

I was looking for something that offered a similar flexibility to designing with Illustrator and InDesign and simultaneously gives me the power to output it onto the web with interactivity.

What was it like designing the website in Weld?

Since the layout came from analogue source it was easy to directly convert it into a web presence without having to go through an initial step of setting up a digital layout. By using the pre-configured assets I was also able to add some elements that I had not thought of before. My business partner also had the chance to remotely discuss the layout with me and I could make changes in real time.

How did the final website turn out, compared to your initial idea?

I think the result is not far from what I had wished for. I see the benefits of using a platform like Weld to quickly get good results, where as if you want perfect results, it needs a bit more time spent.

If I however would have used a platform with templates, my creativity would have been hindered directly, and the result would have stayed at OK.

What are the next steps for Hexlox?

Hexlox will be launching its Kickstarter campaign on March 1st 2016 and will then be rolling out also through wholesalers and directly to bike shops. We’ve also got a few requests about being pre-installed on new bikes which is something which is also very attractive to us.

Ultimately, the Hexlox vision is to put more bikes on the street. Our initial lock is part of the strategy of first making sure that the existing bikes on the street are safe, and then promoting more bikes with better features and solutions.

Will you use Weld in the future?

Paul Bryan is on his way of building a media empire, and he uses Weld to build his websites.

Tell us about Morph Magazine and yourself?

Actually I started out my career creating motherboards for testing equipment, but I felt I was more creatively minded.

That lead me into picking up my passion of photography and journalistic writing, combining the two for our magazine. So I have been a blogger and magazine editor since 2013 alongside being a professional photographer.

Morph Magazine is a free digital publication that focuses on technology, lifestyle, fashion & photography. I am the editor-in-chief and pretty much do all the work single handed, including the reviews, articles, website creation and magazine design. That means when a tool is easy and quick to use, I absolutely love it, hence why Weld is so good for me.

​Why did you pick Weld for the website?

When I first saw Weld in it’s infancy, I immediately felt a connection, it was striving for ease of use, fast turnaround, reactive websites with great design.

I have pretty much tried most site creators and services for our previous incarnation of the magazine (“Million Models”). For instance, Blogger, Tumblr, Wix, Wordpress, while some were better than others, it wasn’t easy to edit the use of the site without templates or extensive digging through limited and confusing tool menus. Weld nails this.

What was it like designing the website in Weld?

Weld is incredibly simple and actually fun to design with. The ability to drag and drop, change settings and placements on the fly. WYSIWYG is a miracle in web design and Weld uses it so well.

Everything went smoothly and allowed for lots of creative design ideas without messing anything up too badly.

I now use Weld for our main hub page which links to all our little sub sites also using Weld:

Our Freebie page which hosts Grading Presets and other bits and bobs for our readers to download.

The Submission page which allows people to easily contact us through a variety of means.

What did you discover/learn while designing? How did the final website turn out, compared to your initial idea?

Primarily I learnt the wealth of features available that at first I didn’t make full use of. Especially loving the new object state changes for when items are hovered over or clicked, pretty nifty and will be making use of in the future!

The website is still evolving and will likely change in the future, I wanted to get something functional and ‘decent’ looking up for release, but I am sure to refine it in the near future.

What are the next steps for Morph Magazine? Will you use Weld in the future?

Morph Magazine itself is launching in January 2016, so I am expecting to be working hard on our content as well as the community of readers.

I am definitely going to use Weld in the future, not quite sure what for yet...but I’ll work it out!

Weld is a next generation web design tool and to say that I was asked to be an ambassador for it is quite frankly a privilege!

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Check out Morph Magazine on the web, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the last few weeks, we’ve been doing a major overhaul on our servers. We’re migrating a big part of our data to Firebase. This will enable all sorts of cool features in the future, including real-time collaboration.

On Tuesday January 26th, at 08:00am CET (2:00am Eastern), we will do this upgrade. It should take 2-3 hours.

During the migration, we will disable editing your projects and websites. However, your websites will be available to your users as normal.

Follow this blog post for updates!

//Henric, Weld CTO

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Awesome students at the media school Medieinstitutet created fundraising websites for Radiohjälpen as a school project. The end results was so good, that two campaigns will be used “live” by Radiohjälpen.

Campaign #ÅretsJulönskning: http://www.aretsjulonskning.se

When the startup hub SUP46 started using Weld, it wasn’t the typical Weld use case. They already had a Wordpress website, but they had difficulties managing the Partners page. The solution: embedding a Weld website within their existing site!

Michael Weinstock, service manager at SUP46, explains:

Tell us about SUP46 and yourself - what do you do?

SUP46 is a member-based community, home to Sweden’s next startup stars. It is also an open meeting place for the whole startup scene.

I’m the Service Manager, meaning I make sure the basics of running the place are covered. This includes making sure the web page is up and running and kept up to date.

Michael with other members of the SUP46 team

What is the background of the SUP46 Partners website and why did you pick Weld for the project?

We did the classic startup mistake in building our web page - we bought a website but not continuous support for it. So as more material was added the constraints became apparent - I could only fit so many partner logos into one page as I didn’t know how to make changes to the templates. Also it was time consuming - I had to skip back and forth in Wordpress to change logo sizes and placement. And one thing about logos is that even if two logos are identically in pixel width one might “feel” bigger than the other which made our CEO wish for incremental changes to be made.

What was it like building the website in Weld?

All of a sudden I could pretty much drag-and-drop the logos, which has been a huge time-saver.

Drag-and-drop images in Weld

Also, I could size and resize the logos freely, where I before had to settle for preset sizes. It was a bit tricky at first, a bit beta-esque (this was in spring 2015 before the official launch), but even when I had to do mini-hacks in Weld it was still a breeze in comparison to what I had been doing.

What did you discover/learn during the design/building phase?

I discovered that I preferred making one version for mobile and one for desktop and keep them separated. Trying to make changes to both versions at the same time just had me confused. Also, I had to remember to make a picture placeholder before uploading a logo, and had to locate the file on my computer and upload it, but anything once put into Weld then became truly drag-and-droppable and resizable.

Lastly I had to write all the URL’s by hand rather than copy/paste, and then found it was easier to just start from scratch on a link rather than try to edit it, but even with all of this it was more than worth it. I spent one hour building the whole page. I could get embed/iframe code for my Weld page and our homepage guy could just paste it in whatever he had built. It was a near perfect quickfix.

“Having once worked with WYSIWYG, I don't ever want want to go back to not having it. Just like I wouldn’t want to go back to having a phone that lacked a touch screen.” - Michael Weinstock

We'll definitely look at Weld for our next homepage. I for one feel that having once worked with WYSIWYG, I don't ever want want to go back to not having it. Just like I wouldn’t want to go back to having a phone that lacked a touch screen.

Read more about SUP46 here, also on Facebook and Twitter.

Weld’s CEO Tom Söderlund got interviewed by Nick Hagar on the Intuitive Future podcast. Nick asked some really tough questions - you decide if Tom managed OK.

We launched a new landing page today:

It’s a very standard landing page, but the tagline indicates a departure from websites, to web apps.

It’s not a pivot, building interactive apps has always been the vision of Weld. Only 0.5% of the population can code, and we’re building a tool for the other 99.5%.

However we decided to take a tree-tier approach (1: prototypes, 2: (web)design, 3: interactive apps) because it was the only way we could launch a product earlier so we could get feedback earlier. That feedback has been tremendously helpful.