This article was published on July 16, 2015

XPRS wants you to have fun building an awesome website using Polydoms


XPRS wants you to have fun building an awesome website using Polydoms

A lot goes into building and designing a website, and it’s often tedious work. A new service, XPRS, wants to make the process fun, and has reimagined how we push content onto websites with a series of building blocks it calls Polydoms.

Often, a website uses WordPress as its Content Management System (CMS). To get the most out of WordPress, you’ll need some programming know-how. If you don’t know how to code, WordPress is still good as a simple blogging tool, but that’s about it. XPRS is attempting to take the simple ethos WordPress has and make it scalable, even for mobile sites.

The backbone of all this is Polydoms, which are the building blocks of a website in XPMS. A site uses a series of Polydoms — which can be a picture, video, text or any other bits of information you want to display — to build a section. Sections reside in pages, and a series of pages comprise a website. Polydoms are dymanic, not just HTML elements that sit next to one another on a page.

Polydoms are designed to be easy enough that even someone who doesn’t know how to code can use them — and that’s the market XPRS is aiming for.Rather than learn a programming language to create websites, you can build it with Polydoms.. XPRS thinks they’re a more intuitive and modern way to build beuatiful, responsive websites.

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Explaining Polydoms, XPRS says they’re like molecular building blocks for the Web:

Instead of writing web pages from pieces of basic HTML, Polydoms allow you to build content (blog post, website, product, etc) from dynamic objects that know how to connect to one another. It’s a bit like building web content from Lego bricks. There are wide variety of benefits to this system: The construction/creation is much faster, you can easily and almost infinitely change a design and layout, the content is responsive and automatically adjust itself to the screen, and search engines can easily scan it because it has a logical semantical structure.

Polydoms allow a user to have full control over a site’s content and experience. All sites created via XPRS are mobile-ready and hosted for free; and if you need support, XPRS says its team “knows who you are and what website you’re building.”

XPRS is also building an e-commerce platform for customers, which it says is also free to use.

You can start from scratch and build your site with Polydoms from the ground up, or adapt a template to your page. There are several formats to choose from depending on what your needs may be.

XPRS is written in Python and HTML5, and relies on the Polydom template engine; the codebase and Polydom template format allow XPRS to be nimple, responsive, fast and (possibly infinitely) scalable.

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To help users edit their site on the go, XPRS has an iOS app coming in August. From an iPhone or iPad, users can add a picture, text-based posts or products.

XPRS finds itself in a crowded space; sites like Wix, Webydo and Squarespace compete for the attention of designers and developers alike. With its plug-and-play scalability and ease of use, XPRS may end up being the darling of the DIY Web design scene.

For students and non-proits, XPRS is free — which includes unlimited hosting, e-commerce and access to themes. Commercial accounts are $7.95 per month, and have all the same benefits of a student account. White Label, Resellers and Professional accounts are $250 annually, and come with unlimited licenses for clients to use.

➤ XPRS

Read next: The future of cards in Web design

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