SnapPages Takes Aim At The Wixes And Weeblys Of The World With Major New Redesign

Today, the website creation market is dominated by a handful of veteran players, as companies like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace now own the majority of mindshare and boast tens of millions of users between them. While many smaller players ended up in the deadpool during the market's land grab, one veteran startup has managed to survive — and even bootstrap its way to profitability. Today, five-year-old website creator, SnapPages, is rolling out a major redesign and upgrade that aims to lure aspiring site builders away from name-brand competitors by offering a service that's actually accessible to everyone — whether you're a novice or a wily professional.

Today's website creators tend to cater to one or the other, SnapPages CEO Steven Testone explains. For first-timers, there are plenty of options that focus on ease-of-use and simplicity, but they generally do so at the sacrifice of power and flexibility — and vice versa. With its new launch, SnapPages wants to strike a balance between the two, creating an app-centric platform that breaks the user experience down into small, bite-sized pieces that are easier to digest. Thanks to smartphones and tablets, users are already familiar with this style, which reduces on-boarding friction for new users and offer additional functionality without sacrificing simplicity.

Those already familiar with SnapPages may take a second to acclimate to the new platform, as Testone tells us that it's been completely re-designed and re-programmed from the ground up. For starters, the platform is now HTMl5-optimized. Whereas SnapPages' apps were originally written in Flash and its websites were in HTML, at launch, the entire package is HTML5 and optimized for touchscreens.

The startup has also made its new "Themes" much more customizable, giving users the ability to resize elements, increase margins and customize colors and have it update throughout the theme (on multiple pages) without touching any code. Furthermore, while its old themes were pretty stale, SnapPages has created a new library of themes users can choose from — and the same goes for typography. On top of that, the new platform offers color linking, color menus, the ability to customize your site's navbar and add custom social icons and footer menus, to name a few.

Rattling off a list of features is lame, to be sure, but it gives you a sense that SnapPages actually pays attention to the details — like being able to tweak line-heights and weights. If you're just looking to create a quick website, features like advanced typography won't matter and you can just skip over them. But if you're more aesthetically-minded and detail-oriented, these details add another layer of customization that other site builders tend to overlook.

Furthermore, customizations like tweaking the positioning, width and look of your navbar, generally requires access to style sheets or are changes that one would have to re-write in CSS. For novices, that sounds frightening, but for pros, it's expected. It's a tough line to walk, because it's so easy to go too far in one direction. But, by using a drag-and-drop interface for template changes and an improved, more accurate WYSIWYG for more transparent previewing, SnapPages makes its user experience more navigable and user-friendly

Rather than requiring users to build their site around one big content management system (CMS), SnapPages "app-ifies" the process, offering a toolbox of apps to build your website, with an app to manage content, another to manage themes, one for your files, one for photos — and so on. Users can make changes to all of them at once or one at a time, publishing changes to their site in realtime. anis pretty navigable and user-friendly, given

While SnapPages may miss on one or two features in a side-by-side comparison, it still has a lot to recommend it. Services like Weebly — both in function and design — are optimized for simplicity and offer a few cool, stand-out features like an interactive site planner and a mobile editor. But SnapPages is sleek, intuitive and easily competes with competitors from a design standpoint.

But if you're not into design, maybe a back-end aficionado, SnapPages 2.0 also includes new cloud hosting/CDN infrastructure for user websites. In other words … SnapPages has moved to the cloud with the goal of adding speed and scalability to customer websites. No one likes slow, gummy rendering, people. No one.

Testone gives the example of a user who recently had a blog post she'd written go viral — which later prompted an invite to The Today Show — attracting millions of hits in a few hours time. Had the site been on its old infrastructure, it would have gone down within an hour, the CEO says, but instead it stayed up without losing much speed.

But, if you're still yawning and can't identify any "value-add" hidden in SnapPages' model, there's also the fact that it has a good story. In other words: In an era where every other startup seems to have $10 million in the bank, SnapPages is somewhat unusual. The company doesn't hail from Silicon Valley, hasn't raised any outside capital and has remained afloat without spending big dollars on advertising.

Since launching at TC50 in 2008 it's had no more than two full-time employees at any given time. Furthermore, its roadmap hasn't exactly been characterized by "explosive growth" or much that would qualify as a vanity metric. Yes, the Austin, Texas-based startup has managed to bootstrap its way to profitability, but that didn't happen quickly. It took four years, growing slowly via word-of-mouth and by allowing professional designers using its platform to contribute to the development of its apps and themes.

SnapPages set out to differentiate itself from an increasingly crowded space by building an all-in-one publishing platform that focused on offering an intuitive interface that reduced the number of customization options available to users. Today, it's going back on that slightly by ratcheting customization up a few notches, along with adding key functionality like optimizing site rendering and layout for mobile.

Going forward, it would be great to see SnapPages open its doors to third-parties so that can developers can build their own apps on the platform and (improve) the user experience. Either way, as long as it can maintain some semblance of balance between simplicity and ease-of-use, the new-and-improved SnapPages is showing itself to be a worthy alternative to the Wixes and Weeblys of the world.