This may be the first time you’re hearing about Breezi, so let me explain a bit about who we are and what we’ve been working on.

Today, we’re releasing the Designbot as part of our website builder platform, which you may have used in the past.

So what does Designbot do? 

Designbot makes design iteration, and getting to a design that you love, much faster. It also makes the process enjoyable, by simply showing you results and letting you say what you like and don’t like. Designbot then takes that input and generates more designs based on your feedback.

For small business owners with small budgets and no time, Designbot can help you go through hundreds of iterations and get a great looking unique website up in a minutes. In the past, small businesses have been limited to rigid cookie-cutter templates, or hiring a professional designer, but Designbot now lets you have a fully custom designed site quickly and easily.

For creatives, it allows you to start from a point that is closer to what you want to end up with. After picking your design, you enter the Breezi editor, and have very powerful customization options, so you can make the more finite adjustments that you need to accomplish your vision.

The Thinking Behind Designbot

I’d like to now explain why we built Designbot, and what we’ve accomplished to date.

A while ago, we thought it would be interesting to build a guided design experience while creating a website. A tool to help take your inputs and guide them. An example would be If you want to change the size of your font, for example, let us suggest that you also change the line height.

A pretty simple idea at heart around the belief that all good design is based on math. More specifically, designs of web pages that contain information.

Design has been based on math since its birth.

While I don’t have enough data to prove it, my belief is that most digital designers don’t think that design is based on math. They do, but they don’t. Since they are the creators, most people don’t really believe that what happens in a designer’s mind could be done with a machine.

At best, most digital designers believe that math is just a validation technique. It’s a post-production thought. In some forms of art, that may be true. That the raw material is there, and math is just a testing technique to get a better composition or balance things out.

In web design, however, math can have a larger influence.

It can define the core concepts and really reshape the raw material (content and core structure). It can be part of the core process of design. Math can be treated as a first class citizen from the beginning. In some cases, it could even reshape the core structure.

You may have come across math’s influence on typography, balance, white space, composition, colors, etc. You were probably intrigued, but that’s it. It’s nice, you get it…but it leaves out the magic.

Our thesis was that this “magic” was a solvable problem. And that, as humans, we are very good at recognizing lots of patterns, are able to be influenced by those patterns, and then remix and implement them in our own creations.

All we needed to do was replicate this process in our algorithm, which turned out to be easier said than done.

After almost two years, the Designbot is a first stab at solving this immense challenge, with the following limitations:

• It’s restricted to simple web pages
• It’s limited to a certain library of images and content
• It’s for a set number of use cases only to start out

It’s by no means anywhere close to what a professional web designer can accomplish, because of the limitations we have on resources and time. However, we have laid all of the underlying technology to be able to accomplish this in the journey ahead.

Our Most Notable Accomplishments

• We built the world’s first color scheme generation platform. It can take any given color and produce beautiful schemes that can actually be applied to an entire page (not just backgrounds and text). Color scheme generation that is agnostic of the page’s content and layout is extremely different than coming up with a general color scheme.
• We designed a very powerful layout generation platform, which can manipulate and create new layouts on the fly.
• All the designs generated are then brought into Breezi, and can be fully edited with an incredible amount of flexibility and control.
• A design can be produced in less than 2 seconds.
• The designs are all generated on the fly.
• Background imagery served within our designs are processed on the fly.
• The designs produced from the engine are beautiful, and offer tremendous variety.
• We have a large library of apps that can be manipulated in terms of content, settings, form, and design on the fly.
• All the designs are fully responsive, and are also backed by a device optimization platform, which can optimize functionality such as navigation menus and galleries for your particular device.

I think those are pretty impressive accomplishments.

However, our algorithm also has a very long way to go. Our goal with this release is not to say, “Hey, we’ve replaced the designer.” It’s to say that we’ve taken a stab at a very hard problem, and feel that we have fairly good results.

We truly hope that it has value to people that could never afford professional design services.

On a separate note, we’re bringing back the free plan for Breezi sites. Read more about that here.

Thanks so much for reading.

With much respect,
Navid + Team

The post Designbot: The Story Behind the World’s First Design Remix Engine appeared first on Breezi.

We’ve brought back the free plan.

You’ll now be able to fully create and publish your site for free.

The following features are reserved for Breezi Pro plan users

• Your own domain
• Removal of Breezi badge
• Creating more than 2 pages
• Removing Breezi favicon
• Using FTP sync option
• Bulk style propagation
• Use of dot profiles

We hope that this change allows many more people to enjoy Breezi’s powerful capabilities.

The post Breezi Free Plans Are Back appeared first on Breezi.

For those who do not know what Device Optimizer is, basically it is a feature that will optimize your site to make it work properly on different devices, changing part of the behavior of the apps in order to get a better user experience when you’re surfing your site using a mobile device.

In this case we will focus on the Navigation and Image Gallery apps. If we talk about Navigation app, I can tell you that now the entries are correctly aligned and if you have any sub-menus you will be able to access them just by pressing the parent link and a pop up bubble will appear with all of the sub-links so you can select any of them. Here are a couple of screenshot about the Navigation app:

Navigation app before and after Device Optimizer

In regards to the Image Gallery app, now you can swipe your finger to navigate through the images, this way we got rid of the pagination arrows and now you can take full advantage for your smartphone’s capabilities. This is how the app looks:

Image Gallery app before and after Device Optimizer

In order to activate this feature, please go to your site and click on the “More” tab, then click on the Device Optimizer option. The device optimizer modal will appear on the screen, once it happens just click on the check-box and save. After that, you will have to click on the Publish Changes button and you’ll be ready to go.

Let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Warmest regards,

The post Device Optimizer Is Back! appeared first on Breezi.

It’s a huge step for Breezi because we will start to do most of your work in terms of actually “designing” your site. That is arguably most of the work that anyone does when creating their site besides content.

What do we mean by “design engine”?

We’ve created something that can take your inputs in terms of color, use case, imagery and be able to generate millions of design results on the fly. That’s what we mean by design engine.

I won’t tell you exactly how we’re going about this problem but what I can tell you is that if you have good taste but don’t know how to design, you will love it.

We’re excited

Well, it’s the world’s first attempt at a design engine. Never before have you been able to give a machine some basic hints and get hundreds of results that match your taste. You’ll be able to drill down or stay broad. And of course, any design comes with all the super powerful editing features of Breezi. That means that you can keep it just like that or edit every single part.

Some history

When we set out to build Breezi, the idea was to created a guided design experience. That meant that we wanted to help you design without requiring you to know the fundamentals of design. Here an example: when you change your font size, your line height would change along with it or when you change your text color, we’d check for legibility.

Those were just parts of it but the larger idea was to connect all of those decisions so you could make incremental choices yourself and end up with something that looked unique but didn’t require you to understand the fundamental math behind design.

So that was the dream. It turned out that you need a lot of standardization under the hood to be able to do something like we dreamed of. That took a long time. Breezi took 2 years to develop, was released in a super premature beta in 2012 and finally came out of beta in october of 2012. In the past few months we were able to finally start dreaming up how to help guide the user on how to design.

This is what this new release is about.

When will it be released?

Monday, the 29th of April.

What does this mean for current users?

Nothing inside of the editor will change. So you guys have nothing to worry about.

Beta

Our design engine’s design possibilities will increase with time so be patient with us as we perfect this beast. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to release something half-baked. Just that we think 30 billion possibilities is good enough for beta. We want to see how you like this to know if we’re really providing you value or not. Your feedback is very important to us.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

You can signup to get notified on our homepage. We’ll put up a video previewing the design engine on Wednesday the 24th.

As a personal note, I’d truly appreciate it if you do like what we do, tell everyone you know about it.
Thank you so much,
Navid

The post World’s First Design Engine appeared first on Breezi.

With this new app you will be able to create your own custom forms in a matter of seconds. We have integrated Jotform which is one of the best form builders on the market and now you can generate your custom form without leaving your website, how amazing is that!

Do not waste your time and access your site so you can try the Form Builder app.

Did I mention that this is a free app? Go ahead and enjoy!

All the best,

The post Form Builder Has Arrived! appeared first on Breezi.

What you will learn

In this article you will learn how to create your own forms by using our Form Builder by Jotform.

Instructions

Follow the next steps in order for you to create your own custom forms.

1. Go to the Apps tab and look for the Form Builder app and install it where you want the app to be displayed.

Go to the Apps tab in order to find the Form Builder app

2. The first thing you will see once you have installed the Form Builder app is a button that says “Generate a new form”, please click on it.

You’ll have to click on this button in order to generate your new custom form

3. Once you have clicked on the button you will see an overlay window where you can choose to use a blank form in order for you to customize it or to select a ready to use form. There are over 2500 ready to use forms!

You can select a ready-to-use form or a blank form so you can fully customize it

 Ready-to-use forms

If you select this option you will be able to select a form form over 2500 different templates.

There are over 2500 ready to use templates

In order to use any of these predesigned templates just hover your mouse over the template that you want to use and click on the “Select Template” button and then click on the ”Continue” button located on the bottom right corner. You’ll be asked to enter an email address, this will be the address where you will receive the responses. Once you enter your email address you will have to hit the Save button.

Enter the email address where you’d like to receive the responses

It might take a couple of seconds for your form to appear. Once the form appears it will be ready to use.

If you want to modify the form you will only need to hover your mouse over the form and hit the “Edit this form” button.

Click on this button in order to edit your form

You will see the Edit panel where you will be able to add or remove fields as well as changing colors or modifying the thank you message.

From this panel you will be able to edit the entire form, from adding or deleting fields to changing the visual aspect of the form. Once you’ finish you only need to click “Done”.

Blank form

In case that you want to create a brand new and fully custom form, you can click on the Blank form option. Once you do it you will see the fallowing panel

Create your own form from a scratch

On the left side you will see the Form Tools, these tools will be the fields or specific items of your form, you can do plenty of things from adding just basic text boxes to survey tools and payment tools.

On the top you will find the styling options such as colors, fonts, background, etc. Once you finish creating your form you only need to hit the “Done” button.

If you need more information about what each of the options can do for you, you can click here.

Questions?

We hope you find this article useful but if you have any comments or questions you can always send us an email to help@breezi.com or leave a comment below and we will be more than happy to assist you.

All the best,

The post Create Your Own Custom Forms With Our Form Builder by Jotform appeared first on Breezi.

What will you learn?

In this article you will learn how to use the Table app so you can display your information in an organized and clean way.

How it works

The Table app will let you add Columns and Rows so you can have your information organized into cells, displayed in the classic spreadsheet view or independent columns.

How to add a new column

In order for you to add a new column you only need to click on the Edit Content button (Pencil) and you will have to click on the option that says Add New Column.

Click on the edit Settings button in order to access the CMS panel to add a new column

You will have to type the title or the specific text you want to appear on the first cell of the column. It does not necessarily have to be text, you can also use images or videos.

You can type any text you want. You can also add images or videos

In order to edit the rest of the cells of the columns you only need to double click on the text, once you do it you will be able to edit the content in place.

You can edit the cells just by double clicking on them

If you want this new column to look different than the rest, then you can check the “Feature Column” option and save.

Check this box in order to make this column a Featured Column

This action will let you manage specific styles for the Featured Column such as color for title cell as well as for content cells, borders, gradients, margins, padding and spacing among other options, this way you will be able to differentiate that column from the rest.

You will be able to differentiate featured columns from the rest by applying different colors, borders, gradients, margins, spacing and padding using the style dots

How to add a new row

In order for you to add a new rows you only need to click on the Edit content button (Pencil) and you will have to click on the option that says Add New Row.

Click on this option in order to add a new row. Remember that you can also use images and videos

You will have to type the title or specific text you want to appear on the first cell of the row. The same as in the columns, it does not necessarily have to be text, you can also use images or videos.

In order to modify the rest of the cells of that row you will only have to double click  on the text, easy as that.

You can also highlight specific rows, this option is really useful when you want to attract your visitor’s attention to an specific part of the table. In order to highlight a column you only need to click on the Edit Content button, then select the option that says Manage Rows, after that you will have to select the row you want to highlight and lastly you will need to check the option that says Highlight Row and save.

Check this option in order to highlight the selected row

Remember that you can add as many columns and rows as needed.

Extra Features

If you thought that highlighting columns and rows was the only feature of the app, I’m so sorry to tell you this but, you were wrong. There are other cool things you can do in order to change the look of your table, so keep reading.

Table Style

If you click on the Edit Settings button, the first thing you will see at the top would be the Table Style. On the dropdown menu you will find two options. The first one is Grid and the second one is Independent Columns.

You can choose between the classic Grid view or Independent Columns view

Grid is a classic spreadsheet table style whereas Independent Columns will separate the columns so they can have different heights.

Here’s an example of how the same table looks on the different type of views

Grid View Settings

With these settings you will be able to to decide whether to display or not the Row Title Column or the Row Title Header.

You can decide either to display or not the Row Titles Column and the Row Titles Header

It is really important to mention that this settings will only apply if the Table is set to display the information on the Grid view.

Independent Columns Settings

In this option you will only be able to modify the spacing in between the independent columns. You can choose from 5px, 10px, 15px or 20px.

You can decide how much space to leave in between columns

Now you’re ready to create an amazing table! Go ahead and access your site in order to try this app.

Let us know if you have any comments or questions.

All the best,

The post Table App appeared first on Breezi.

What you will learn

In this article you will learn how to use the new features of the Video app such as:

• Autoplay
• Display player controls
• Auto hide controls
• display info
• Show related videos
• Modify the look of the player

Autoplay

Have you ever wanted to add a video that starts to play as soon as your site loads? maybe an introductory video? but you did not have coding experience so you could not make it happen, well autoplay is now available!

In order to activate this feature you will have to go to the Edit Settings button

Click on the Edit Settings button in order to get access to the new features

After you click on the Edit Settings button you will see the Autoplay option. In order to activate this option you only need to click on the checkbox and save.

Check the autoplay option and save

Once your visitors access your site, your video will start to play automatically, sweet.

Display Player Controls

There might be times when you need to display a video without displaying the player controls and only show the play button. This feature is really important when you need your visitors to see the complete video and not just part of it by letting them move forward using the progress bar.

You can take advantage of this option by going to the Edit Settings button, checking or unchecking the Display Player Controls option and save.

Use this option in order to display or hide the player controls

If the option is not checked, your video will look like this

As you can see, this video is not displaying the player controls at all

Auto Hide Controls

This option is really useful in order to make the video player controls disappear this way your visitors will not get distracted by the progress bar moving. But  you will also have the opportunity to bring the controls back just by hovering your mouse over the video.

The player controls will only appear if you hover your mouse over the video

Display info

At the top of each video you will see an information bar. In this bar you can see the title of the video as well as some sharing options and the info button which basically displays the number of times that the video has been played as well as the subscribe button and thumbnails.

Now you can decide whether to hide or display the information bar. Just check or uncheck the Display Info option and save.

If this option is checked, the information bar will be displayed whereas if it is unchecked the information bar will be hidden and not accesible

Show Related Videos

Once your video is over, a bunch of related videos will appear on the screen so you can click on them. Sometimes the related videos are videos from your competitors so it is better not to display them. Said that, you have the opportunity to not to display the related videos and instead of that just make your video go back to its initial state. You can do this by checking/unchecking the Show Related Videos option on the Edit Settings modal.

With this option you will be able to decide whether to display or not the related videos once your video is over

Modify The Look of The Player

You can now modify the color of the progress bar as well as the theme of the player, this way you can customize even more your site. Just go to the Edit Settings modal and click on the last two options of the player settings.

You will be able to select either a Red or White progress bar. You will also be able to select between the Light or Dark themes

These new features will let you take total control of what you’re displaying on your site, so go ahead and play a little bit with these options, I’m sure you will love them as much as I do.

Let us know if you have any comments or questions.

All the best

The post The Video App’s New Features appeared first on Breezi.

The post Show Controls For your Videos appeared first on Breezi.

Note that it can take from to 24 to 48 hours for the change to take effect.

Steps

To verify that your domain has been pointed successfully, follow the next steps:

1. Visit network-tools.com
2. Select “Ping” from the available options
3. Enter your domain name on the respective field
4. Click “Go”

From the available options, click on the radio labeled “Ping”

Type your domain address and hit the “GO!” button below

Check that the IP is “107.20.136.32″

See if the IP address 107.20.136.32 displays there. If it does, then your domain was successfully pointed!

If it doesn’t, it may take more time and you should double check that the DNS Zone (DNS Manager, Domain Settings, etc.) from part one was made correctly.

You may also want to take a look at the FAQ for troubleshooting.

Still Having Problems?

Contact our tech support via email (help@breezi.com) or on the Live Chat.

Or ask below on the comments!

The post Verify that Your Domain Was Pointed Successfully appeared first on Breezi.