Recently we had a VC fire us an email with some direct questions about Buildor. It was really interesting in that the questions give some insight into people’s knee-jerk brain assessments of the product so I thought I’d share them Q&A style here.
Have you got any questions about Buildor?
*Will the Company offer hosting solutions?
We see partnerships with companies such as MediaTemple and Rackspace very much on the horizon, but part of the beauty of Buildor is that we don’t impose fixed hosting requirements on our users – you can publish anywhere. BuildorLite customers already have live content - moving hosts is an additional barrier to entry for them.
*Will the Company allow SEO “key word” manipulation?
Buildor is brilliant at facilitating the technical elements of SEO. You can edit the meta tags of your page (click Page Properties in the top menu in BuildorLite) very easily, and use structured H1, H2 etc tags and indented H1 image backgrounds with rich keywords etc etc in BuildorPro.
*Is the code produced WC3 compliant?
Fundamentally, Buildor is all about producing W3C compliant code. We go to huge lengths to ensure the code we create is clean and the same as writing the code by hand. We can do this as we are creating a natural interface to the fabric of the web, HTML and CSS, from the ground up. Other products in the past have attempted to create a proprietary code base for managing WYSIWYG web design – we rejected this path on day one.
*Why does the site fall over on www.amazon.co.uk?
Amazon uses swathes of server side code to deliver very dynamic content. They still use HTML and CSS for the core markup of their pages, but wrap all sorts of other code around it. BuildorLite is only interested in your markup which is why it’s perfect for SMEs without an installed CMS.
BuildorPro, in future versions, will be able to upload content containing PHP etc.
*What customer support will the Company offer: IM, phone?
One of our key hires will be a community manager. Their task will be to develop our support program and IM is a possible route. I think phone support (unless we can create at least a revenue neutral position) is unlikely at the early stages.
*Will the Pro Version run more slowly – how will the Company stop this from becoming clunky?
Pro is just as fast a Lite. Our core code is incredibly nimble and the file sizes we are working with (in terms of HTML and CSS) tend to be small – mostly under 100k.
*Will ASP sites work on the buildor.com site?
As a Microsoft language, support for ASP will be further down the track given our LAMP structure.
