DivHunt wish list?

General
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Hello friends!

I want to share my experience with web design and building projects. Although I am not a professional web designer, I have worked on several projects using WordPress in the past for both personal and client use. However, I always found WordPress to be more of a blogging platform with additional elements attached, which made it confusing and sometimes problematic due to issues like plugin conflicts.

Visual-based builders like Elementor changed the game for everyone. Being able to see design changes in real-time and make adjustments easily was a huge advantage, especially for someone like me who works visually.

Last year, I discovered DivHunt, a promising solution for web building and hosting that seemed to address many of the issues I had faced with WordPress. Their approach was innovative and powerful, making website building less of a hassle. I was impressed by DivHunt’s team, methodology, and product, so I decided to invest in their LTD. It felt like the right fit for creating my personal portfolio website efficiently and effectively.

DivHunt allows me to design my website to my desired standard with the speed and flexibility that WordPress couldn’t offer without extensive optimisation. However, some specific WordPress themes still provide certain features that are easier to achieve, albeit in a somewhat hacky way or based on templated elements.

While using DivHunt, I encountered a challenge due to my lack of familiarity with web standards, classes, and hierarchies. As a designer rather than a web developer, navigating these aspects can be overwhelming for me.

Designing for the web feels different from using tools like Illustrator, which I find more intuitive. Tools like Figma are somewhat similar, but I still struggle with certain aspects. Learning a new tool solely for building my portfolio website seems excessive to me.

Although platforms like Squarespace offer simplicity, I prefer having more control over my website. DivHunt’s potential excites me, especially if they deliver on their roadmap promises. While it’s a no-code platform, understanding how web hierarchy works is crucial for achieving the desired results.

An example would be a navbar I made which I wanted to blur the content below. For reasons I don’t understand, the blur only works on the instance that’s applied to the page, not the whole site. Of course I could ask for help, but from a design perspective you want to breeze though and make sure it looks good in the first place before you commit.

There is a learning curve in creating a functional and Google-friendly website that goes beyond traditional design thinking. Platforms like Wix excel in providing intuitive solutions for users with varying levels of expertise.

I recently watched a video discussing how AI could revolutionise web design, sparking thoughts on how DivHunt could leverage AI technology in this space.

So, to offer my 2 cents for how DivHunt could hoover up this part of the market:

  1. Rich Marketplace for Assets
  • It’s a given, and it’s been in the works for a long time, but a marketplace containing a wide range of free and premium assets would significantly enhance the user experience on DivHunt. Users need to be uploading their own templates, themes, and elements that seamlessly integrate with the existing tools provided by the platform. This feature would empower users to select pre-made assets that closely align with their design vision, enabling them to focus on the creative aspect of designing rather than getting bogged down in creating specific elements from scratch. Additionally, having access to a repository of inspiring designs created by other users can stimulate creativity and provide valuable insights for designing unique and visually appealing websites.
  1. Simple Mode
  • Navigating the complex web hierarchy and understanding the order of operations can be a daunting task for designers who prioritise visual aesthetics over technical intricacies. DivHunt could benefit from offering two distinct modes - an advanced mode (the current one) for users well-versed in web design principles and a ‘simplified’mode tailored for those focusing primarily on the design aspect, with more of the behind the scenes stuff being assisted. The simplified mode could streamline the design process by allowing users to interact with design elements intuitively, such as adjusting sizes and proportions, rotation etc just through the mouse, just like illustrator letting you round corners by grabbing the corner. By simplifying the user interface and providing clear guidance on web hierarchy management, DivHunt can empower designers to create visually stunning websites without being hindered by technical complexities.
  1. AI-Assisted Design Features:
  • The integration of AI-assisted design functionalities, akin to those found in platforms like Wix Studio, could revolutionise the design experience on DivHunt. AI technology has the potential to automate common design tasks, such as adding animations or embellishments, thereby expediting the design process and minimising the learning curve for users less familiar with web design conventions. By leveraging AI capabilities to offer intelligent design suggestions and automate repetitive tasks, DivHunt can enhance user productivity and enable designers to achieve professional-looking results with ease. Additionally, AI-driven features could facilitate seamless responsiveness in design layouts, ensuring that websites created on DivHunt are optimised for various devices and screen sizes without requiring manual adjustments.

Given the current value proposition, I think these points could make DivHunt a game changer over most platforms.

Apologies for the massive message, but these are my 2 cents!

1 Like
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Hey @Wayjin, thanks a lot for your input and suggestions!

As a designer myself, I completely understand your point of view. We, the Divhunt team, are all striving to make web development easier for designers and to bring closer the true meaning of “no-code.”

However, there’s a noticeable pattern among no-code tools that don’t require development knowledge (like Wix, Framer, etc.). They are quite limited and aren’t built for scalability or for medium to large-sized websites or businesses. At most, you can create portfolios or static websites. If you want a truly professional website, full of integrations and with all the flexibility you need, you’ll have to look for another solution, e.g., WordPress, Webflow, or now, Divhunt.

So, you definitely need to sacrifice something and choose the path you want to take. In our case, we are trying to create a truly unlimited tool that won’t let you hit any roadblocks in creating your or your clients’ websites in any way.

We REALLY understand the struggles, challenges, issues, and deficiencies of current no-code tools. Coming from over 8 years of professional experience working with clients and agencies, we know all the popular tools in every aspect and have used them extensively for our projects. That’s how Divhunt was born, by the way—we initially started creating a tool for ourselves.

So, I can tell you one thing as a designer with a lot of experience: understanding development processes, fundamentals, and how things generally work will not only help you in creating websites, but it will also help you create MUCH better designs. This is because you will start designing in the same way development works, and your brain will work differently. And if you ask me, that’s what makes the biggest difference between medior and senior designers.

Now, back to Divhunt itself: our main goal is definitely to create all the tools necessary to make development much easier over time. We already have certain features designed and planned, but these take time. We need to publish the working tool first and then fine-tune it and release more intuitive features!

Thanks again for this post; it’s extremely valuable to us. We are extremely user-oriented. If you have any ideas about how you would like certain features to work, please share them with us, or message me directly. We can work on it together!

1 Like
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See? This is why I love this team!

Thanks @Lazarevic I appreciate the reply.
I’m not sure, is there a YouTube channel you could recommend for learning more of the fundamentals?

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Well, we all come from the same background in terms of the learning process. We learned frontend development (pure HTML, CSS, and JS) and then discovered no-code tools, applying the same principles there.

I can highly recommend the course on Udemy: “The Web Development Bootcamp 2024” by Colt Steel. It’s an older course; he just keeps updating the year in the title. This guy is a genius and an extremely good teacher.

Besides that, there are tons of videos on YouTube, and the good thing about this is that you can literally watch any HTML/CSS course or even Webflow, and apply everything you learn on Divhunt. Our platform is essentially a visual builder for HTML/CSS, where you can apply the exact same rules.

The most important things are definitely HTML and CSS, and you don’t need to spend much time learning the basics and fundamentals at all. You’ll see, it’s not extremely complex to learn if you want to use no-code tools anyway. You don’t have to learn all those code syntaxes or anything; you just need a clear logic behind how to structure your builds, nothing else. :smile:

If this can help a bit, I created a short video of the manual process from Figma to Divhunt: https://youtu.be/tavrFURqLek

Maybe we can also create some courses in the future on the Divhunt channel so our users can learn the basics and understand Divhunt better.

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@Wayjin One more very important thing: we have a whole playlist with Divhunt/development basics on our YouTube channel. It can definitely help you a lot: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNFGGrw9WrdmYMssE-bCcgGehMLTJSIKY