PageCloud founder Craig Fitzpatrick presented at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2015
The 15-month-old startup has struck a nerve with creatives who feel frustrated with the tools currently available for web publishing. PageCloud promises to drastically simplify the website creation process by having almost no reliance on code-based development. The idea is that designers and editors can focus on what a web experience looks and feels like without having to call in a developer whenever they want to make design changes.
Based on the numbers, professional designers are already sold on the idea. A presale campaign that launched six months ago drew in more than 1.5 million year-long subscription preorders, representing some 13,000 customers in 100 cities around the world. Strong early demand helped PageCloud draw $6 million in startup financing, including support from Lutke (recently flush from Shopify’s IPO) as well as the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and former 23andMe COO Sarah Imbach.
PageCloud bills itself as the world’s most advanced web editor. Its founder, Craig Fitzpatrick, told Marketing he started developing the platform years ago while working on a previous startup, because he “never wanted to hand-code HTML again.”
Code-free web design isn’t a new idea — the creators of WordPress were tackling it as far back as 2003, and startups like Sharespace and Wix have kept that ball rolling. But Fitzpatrick feels those solutions are fairly limited by their reliance on templates, which have become the de facto standard for codeless design.
Even with thousands of templates available, template-based sites always end up feeling a bit cookie-cutter, Fitzpatrick said. And any real customization requires bringing in a developer — which sort of goes against the whole idea of code-free design.
“You feel happy in the first ten minutes, because you went shopping and you bought something cheap and you set it up,” he said. “You start getting frustrated the very next day, when you just want to make what you think is a simple change like moving an image one inch to the right. The vast majority of templated systems out there just fall over. You have to drop to writing code.”
Like many of the more modern design platforms, PageCloud forgoes a WordPress-style backend in favour of an “editing mode” browser button that allows direct editing of the page itself. “When you hit ‘save’ that page is instantly live on the web. All the technology is taken care of for you,” Fitzpatrick explained. “If you want to make it mobile-friendly, you press the ‘mobile’ button, you move things around a bit, you hit ‘save’ again, suddenly you have a mobile-friendly site.”
But the biggest difference designers will notice is how deeply integrated it is with design tools such as Photoshop. A design canvas created in Adobe Creative Cloud can be loaded into PageCloud layer by layer, preserving the components of the original design. (Fitzpatrick boasts that this was technically very difficult to figure out, and PageCloud is the first publishing platform that’s been able to do it.) Designers can also copy over an existing website into PageCloud, and begin drag-and-drop editing at will.
Fitzpatrick said another of PageCloud’s goals was to make spot editing much faster and more painless for non-developers, so anyone can quickly fix a typo or change out a logo and push changes live immediately. The editing mode makes that fairly simple — click an “edit” button in your browser’s toolbar and you can add, delete or freely move around page elements. All changes will be committed and published immediately once the editor is closed.
Fitzpatrick said that moving away from templates towards quick, inexpensive and easily editable custom design is a direction that a lot of brands will be glad to take. He said it will help them get away from “standard, boxy-looking template designs” that “they don’t touch for a year because it’s just so bloody expensive and time-consuming.”
“This is a branding dream,” he said.
The platform officially launched at the end of November at $24 a month for a subscription. For now, the 17-person PageCloud team based in Ottawa is targeting professional designers (including agency creatives), but Fitzpatrick has much bigger ambitions.
“As huge as the internet is, and as many websites as we have, these are generally being built by very technical people,” he said. “What do we think is going to happen when we open the doors to the other 90% of the population — who is able to do this because it now feels like a desktop publishing experience that they’re already familiar with? It’s massive.”
