Easy Website Creation idea (software)

Hi Guys,

I stumbled across a small idea while I was developing a website today. Let me know what you think of it.

I'm always looking for ways to make things easier for one another, webdesign seems to be quite a stumbling block for many of us, making us dependant on webdesigners. For this purpose I came up with an "idea" for a software tool.

The idea is as follows:
You create an image (from really simple to really complex; all is possible in this utopia) and load it into the software. The software then reads the image and starts to parse it. It will distinguish all navigation bars, and basicly the whole structure of the picture. After this stage it will generate a website from the image.

So basicly this is the idea:
[Image of website] ========> Website
Input <process> Output

So what's your ideas on this? I'm only interested in the practicality of the idea, so don't attack the technical side with comments like "That is not possible blabla"

 

i suppose it would help designers, be able to code a site, however it means that you would need to be good with some type of graphics software, also i think to make the site do anythign that html would be very difficult, and most people know basic html whether it be tables or css most people can make something, personally i think the idea would be great if you could get it do php however i dont think you will ever be able to do that and so i dont think the idea would take off

 

No restrictions. All is possible. Only looking for constructive arguments for/against such a program. Thanks for your views.

 

If you can make such a software you are going to be a millionaire my friend.

A software program like this are going to be very much appreciated and sounds to good to be true if i only need to make some screenshots of the layout components.

If you can produce it i'll be your first customer...
















At a fair price of course

 

Never mind that.I'll be a beta tester
It's a great idea but sounds impossible.But thats how millions are made.

 

If you're looking at practicality, let me say that it's impractical. I do software development for a living, and having [single image] ===> [completed website] is a pipe dream.

Having said that, what *is* possible is supplying varying images for different things (eg: navbar backgrounds, page background, color schemes, etc.) and building a template around that. But, hasn't this already been done to death? If you're good enough with Photoshop that you can come up with really great images, then you should already have the skills to format the images into the required pieces needed to create a full site. Plug those images, color schemes, and fonts into a CSS template (a la csszengarden.com) and there's your site. Really, apart from design sense, that's all a web developer does for you anyway. And if you lack design sense, then even if you could automagically create a full site from a single image, it would still royally suck.

I do have an idea for a site somewhere inbetween, but I still may pursue it so I won't say much more than that. If you have cash to burn and are willing to fun its development, it could be lucrative.

 

It will take hell of a time and effort to make such a software What do u think that people from adobe and other graphics company have never thought about this ?

Probably what we need is a software which can generate templates on the fly. We do have many websites which provide this but we need more exhaustive options.

 

Well. All said and done, being a naysayer never built any businesses. Nothing really is impossible.

@Wakefield: well, if such a program is made, all you really need to get from a designer is an image. Surely this will cut costs significantly thus shifting work (as all revolutionary ideas have done).

The question I really have is: Will such a program create new markets or doesn't it *really* help anybody, as you still actually need an image. I was hoping to find a (imaginary maybe even utopian) solution to the problem that "newbies" have when making a website. They tend to suck at designing.

 

even if someone went through all the meticulous work of coding that nightmare, it'd be very buggy by its nature, and it would have trouble distinguishing some html elements from others, very easily.

 

@David_sakh
I don't think you are really getting the point of the software (or I'm misinterpretating you). You feed it with an image (say a .jpg) depicting your layout. It then reads the borders etc. and turns it into a website. I don't quite see what you mean with "it would have trouble distinguishing some html elements".

Basicly, I would like to know if there would be a market for such a product.

 

The objective isn't just creating a complete site, but a complete site that can be altered in the future. I found that the problem with templates being sold everywhere is that they can't be easily customized. I've spent hours tweaking with designs I bought. I could make something from scratch in the same time.

If you can develop something like this, please post in this thread in the future, so that we can track it.

And as he said, nothing is impossible. What is a mirage today, is reality tomorrow.

Good luck!

 

sure it is possible but the question is it worth it ? It's a nice idea but I think there are lot's of problems to make it practical in the current form. We are talking about a "image" which will be read by our application and than it will generate the site. Now how are we going to standardize the image for the application to read ? We need to make some changes in your idea to make it more practical to implement I still feels that step by step method to generate the site is the best one.

 

True, but you need to discern where to best spend your time. Being the most positive person in the world never got Sisyphus anywhere either. If you only have one idea, then of course you'll fixate on it wanting to believe that it's the best. Come up with ten ideas, and I'll naysay most of them and probably find maybe one which has some good potential.

Here's a mental exercise for you which I'm actually curious to see how it turns out myself. Let's say you have this incredible .jpg/gif/png file which shows exactly what your site ought to look like. Describe in detailed step-by-step form how an incredibly giften human would take that image and construct a site from it. How would the human distinguish column borders from background borders? Or rollover regions that change colors vs. ones that stay static? Or fonts that should be in text vs. constructed as an image?

The utopian solution is to hire a great designer and pay them to get a really nice design. Or if the kinds of sites the newbies want to build are generic enough, just visit templatemonster.com, pick a template, start filling it with content, and hook up payment processing. Or visit blog hosting sites where they can purchase hosting and get their own semi-customizable theme to go along with it. Or, let's say that you come up with your website service which can take an image file and output a great fully-formed website from it. What's the first step these newbies have to do in order to create that image? Well, probably hire a great designer...

Call me a naysayer, but this idea relies on advanced pattern recognition and design sense that even most humans don't possess (have you seen the crap sites out there??). If you *could* create it -- and yes, anything is possible given sufficient time, money, brains, and motivation -- you'd be better off selling the resulting Artificial Intelligence software to the military as they would drop briefcases full of cash at your feet.

Do you have any other ideas?

 

Thanks for all of your views guys especially Wakefield. You have a good point when you said that you must pick the idea you want to focus on. That's exactly the point of me sharing it with you guys!!

I think it is possible to create such a program but like you said, it will not be worth the time and effort. This idea arose when I was creating a webdesign; it's a pretty time-consuming thing to do and we typically want to spend the least amount of time possible. And it doesn't really make things any easier as customers will have to get a designer in anyway!

If I have any other ideas?
Sure my background lies in Computer Science. I'm currently in my second year of Information Sciences and I am following Psychology at the same time (all at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam).

My interests lies in the Semantic Web. I like the idea of making information, available on the internet, readable for computers as well. Information that can be found on the internet nowadays has no "meaning" for a computer. I forgot to say that I'm a pretty experience Java programmer so when such an idea arises, I would be able to implement it myself.

I just like to share ideas and get comments on them from other people.