A simple site builder for non-techie publishers and marketers
Want to build a simple single-page or multi-page website with no coding skills or technical hassle? Then Redesign CMS is for you! You don't need any documentation to use this straightforward, user-friendly solution. And it's free!
Redesign CMS, a Bootstrap-based site builder has been deprecated as of January 1, 2018.
Instead of adapting Redesign CMS, embracing Bootstrap 4 Alpha, to Bootstrap 4 Beta, the new version is going to use Bulma, "an open source CSS framework based on Flexbox and used by more than 100,000 developers."
Content design needs quick, simple tools
There are lots of site builders out there and, consequently, a plethora of reviews, ratings and reports. In the summary review of Sitebuilderreport, only three website builders achieved a rating of 4/5 or 5/5. These ratings, however, refer to their overall performance across many features and are almost meaningless for a publisher or marketer who just wants to publish an article and focus on content creation in the first place.
"Redesign" content management system is dedicated to content design rather than website design. It is probably the simplest possible solution to publish a single-page site or multi-page app, a landing page, a longform article or even a small blog. Despite its simplicity, Redesign CMS boasts features and design options that other site builders lack, due to its openness and curation of the best services available.
So easy anyone can use it!
Building a website is a snap. No technical knowledge is needed and there is no steep learning curve to get comfortable with proprietary rules, limitations and how-tos.
While you create your site, contextual help is available to reduce guesswork. Help texts are often supplemented with screenshots and live examples to walk you through the workflow smoothly and let you focus on your content.
You may always check the design showcase or the portfolio. On both pages you'll find examples for what you are creating at the moment, be it text formatting, images, video integration or cool features such as displaying content as cards.
Example: beginners-friendly site
This is a site about farmhouse vacations in the Black Forest of Germany. If you already have all the copy and images ready, you can create this kind of site in less than 30 minutes. Even this ultra-simple site has a slider that will be displayed automatically once you insert some image file addresses.
Advanced users can do even more
If you have just a little experience with text editing (e.g. Google+, LinkedIn Pulse, Medium), you can get much more out of Redesign CMS. Add a banner, group your articles into pages, use icons or embellish text with canned formats to boost your site's appeal.
For instance, Google Fonts offers 800+ font families free and gives you virtually unlimited options to let your articles shine. And Redesign CMS is open to adapt these fonts. It's simple to do, it's all cut & paste.
HTML-savvy users immediately know what to do and for beginners it takes only minutes to get familiar with these "styles" as canned formats and examples are provided.
Example: advanced site
Features
The first article is about an event and will automatically expire after that event
Background image
Pages
Embedding external content
Appealing designs made easy
Even using just the basic features of Redesign CMS you can create a professional look. Check out these hotel landing pages for example:
The best of mobile responsive design
Pages created with Redesign CMS are responsive, which means they adapt perfectly to any Internet device, browser window or screen size. The latest standard in responsiveness is backed by Bootstrap, the world's most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for building responsive, mobile-first projects on the web.
Over 700 icons by Font Awesome
Redesign CMS makes it easy (even for novice users) to build in icons from Font Awesome, the iconic font and CSS toolkit. Icons and symbols are really hot right now and perfect for today's content design.
To support its new fonts, which are expected in spring 2017, the company received 10,000% of its Kickstarter goal, making it the most overfunded software project of all time.
A single building block
Web design can get complicated pretty fast once you establish a structure with folders, pages, sub-pages and navigation menus. But Redesign CMS makes web design easy because there is just one building block, called an article. This easy concept is surprisingly versatile. Articles can be sorted in different ways, grouped into pages, shared as free-standing websites or exported to other web pages.
Unlimited designs for experts
If you have some HTML and CSS knowledge, there are unlimited design options in Redesign CMS because it lets you style all your HTML elements.
For instance, you can use Google fonts, as shown here and totally change the appearance of your site.
CSS-savvy users can style each individual article or for all articles
Images and a built-in slider
As the attention span of web site users continues to decline, images and graphics are increasingly important. Plus they have to be mobile responsive so they can be viewed on large PC screens and on the smallest phones. Redesign CMS takes care of all this using Bootstrap's state-of-the-art responsive layout. If there are multiple images to display, the user can just throw them into a single box and they will automatically be shown in a slider like in this page for a spa resort in the Black Forest.
Group articles into pages
If you have lots of articles for your site, you should arrange them by common topics. Page tags come in handy for this because they give you a better overview and create less need for scrolling. It's a totally easy way to transform a single-page site into a full-fledged web app (or multi-page application, MPA). For example, a hotel in the Black Forest with different topics to present, from its spa facilities to its famous Black Forest cake, uses pages to group articles. Other site builder tools use pages that need intermediate hierarchy levels to group them. Redesign has articles that can — but don't have to — be grouped by topic when it makes sense to do so.
Here's how:
In the Edit menu, create some topical pages
You can now assign any article to a page
With this concept, you are free to let content flow between pages as your site grows.
Preview third-party content
You can link to other sites related to your topic from your web page and Google will reward you because pointing to other sources increases the relevance of your site and, therefore, its Google ranking.
But it need not be old-school linking that requires users to click on the link to view the referred content. Today's Internet users are busy and appreciate a preview (or thumbnail) image that gives them an idea of what the linked content is so they don't waste any time by leaving your site, then coming back to it (or not).
Redesign CMS uses Embedly to display YouTube and Vimeo videos and several external formats.
Embedly specializes in many formats, plus you can embed standard external HTML pages. If an image is available, a thumbnail image will be shown along with a text excerpt.
Embedly displays thumbnails in an attractive card format.
The Embedly card format is especially well suited to displaying Tweets and other social media posts such as Instagram images, Pinterest boards and Imgur image galleries.
Users are very demanding when it comes to searches. Many site builders use their own search functions, which often disappoint users. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Redesign CMS takes its cues from one of the best search specialists, Algolia.
This site about vacation homes uses Algolia search so customers can find houses or apartments by keyword. The Redesign CMS showcase site uses Algolia search, too
Adding Algolia search to your Redesign CMS website is easy: only copy & paste. However, some little practice in editing HTML, CSS and Scripts is recommended. Therefore, presently it's only available on request. Here's how it works:
Sign-up with Algolia and create an index, copy the InstantSearch Script
In your Edit menu, there's a textarea to paste the InstantSearch JavaScript into
Redesign CMS creates the search index automatically. Copy and paste it in the Algolia menu
At a later stage, the last step will be done automatically, that is, once you have set up things, you always have a fresh, updated search index of your site's content.
Algolia
Milliseconds matter, instant and relevant results from the first keystroke
Host your site on any server
With Redesign CMS, your site consists of a single HTML page, so it is perfectly simple to host it anywhere. There are many free and budget-friendly hosting options, including Amazon and Bitballoon. Often you can add a domain for as little as 10 USD per year! Compare this to hosters like Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy and the like.
How can a content-rich website fit into one single page with less content than a news article. The magic lies in "asynchroneous loading": this page is smart enough to pull all content it intends to display from many locations on the Internet. It harvests and displays step by step, but fast you can read it.
Plus, you need no webmaster to host your Redesign site on an additional server: for instance, FileZilla offers all you need and anyone can do it. Example: this site of a B&B in Munich is being hosted at Amazon. It loads fast: less then 400ms.
Homepage-Baukasten Redesign CMS
Zurzeit ist der Homepage-Baukasten für neue Anwender nicht verfügbar. Wer bereits angemeldet ist, kann weiterhin seine Webseiten bearbeiten. Eine neue Version wird wahrscheinlich noch 2018 fertig sein. Grund für die Pause ist, dass das "Framework" (das Vorlagensystem für HTML-Seiten) in die Jahre gekommen ist. 2015 entstand die erste Version - und zwar mit weltweiter Alleinstellung: erstens gab es ohnehin kaum einen Website-Baukasten, der mit einem Standard-Framework arbeitete (obwohl das heute, gerade im Hinblick auf die vielen mobilen Endgeräte, das einzig logische ist - anstatt eigenes CSS zu basteln, das schnell fehlerhaft wird). Zweitens gab es garantiert keinen Do-it-yourself-Dienst zur Homepage-Erstellung, der mit Bootstrap 4 arbeitete, das in der ersten Alpha-Version im Sommer 2015 bereitstellt wurde. Leider kamen die Entwickler zwei Jahre lang nicht aus den Alpha-Puschen - und es war aufwändig, CSS-Bezeichner, die sich in dieser Zeit immer wieder änderten, anzupassen. Nun ist Bootstrap 4 endlich fertig. Die künftige Version von Redesign CMS wird überarbeitet und entweder Bootstrap-4-formatierte Seiten erstellen oder aber Bulma benutzen, ein sehr modernes Framework, das leichtgewichtiger ist als der Gigant Bootstrap - und evtl. der richtige Partner für einen leichtgewichtigen und smarten Homepage-Baukasten ist. Beispiel: diese Seite zu Urlaub in Deutschland oder Leistungsübersicht der Werbung für Urlaubsanbieter
Tourismuswerbung "redesigned"
Die Tourismuswerbung Dr. Ritter nutzt neue Wege, um Urlaubsinteressenten und Gastgeber zusammenzubringen. Wer kennt nicht die öden "Werbetexte" auf Buchungsportalen? Sie sind nicht für die Urlaubsinteressenten, sondern einzig für Google geschrieben. Sie tragen zur Internet-Vermüllung bei - und die Individualität der Gastgeber geht verloren. Da es die großen Reise-Sites geschafft haben, durch aggressives Preis-Marketing (und eben die Allgegenwärtigkeit im Netz durch Spam-SEO), das Interesse der Urlauber auf sich zu ziehen, bleiben die Homepages der Gastgeber immer mehr im Hintergrund.
Die Werbeagentur von Dr. Eckard Ritter in Fürth und Berlin - in Kooperation mit der Tourismuswerbung Popp in Ingelheim - nutzt neben konventionellem Content Marketing (mit eigenen redationellen, informativen und Referenz-reichen Inhalten) Google Maps. Das Geo-Informationssystem von Google ist eine Plattform, die extrem trendig ist und durch den Mobil-Trend nochmals beschleunigt wird.
Urlaub in Deutschland (Stand 01.03.2018): Urlaubsanbieter mit Tourismuskarten
