Introducing the Lean Designs Website Builder

I’m thrilled to announce the public launch of the new Lean Designs Website Builder.

This new tool, which has been in the works for several weeks, lets you visually design a website’s layout on top of the 960 grid system and then export it to HTML/CSS.

To get started, check out the new homepage or head straight to the new templates page. If you have an account, you can create your own directly from your dashboard or you can sign up for free if you don’t.

Background

About five weeks ago I launched the specifications tool, which spits out detailed specs on your mockup. The overwhelming feedback afterwards was that people wanted a way to export their designs to HTML/CSS. Since jMockups, the high fidelity mockup tool that I’ve been working on has failed to catch on and people were telling me they’d happily pay for an export feature, I decided to pivot a bit and start working towards it.

Creating a full blown export feature that produces quality code for any design will be a long endeavor, so for the the first release — the minimum viable product — I started building a 960gs layout generator.

With it becoming increasingly apparent that this was going to be the long term direction of the app, I changed its name from jMockups to Lean Designs. And rather than cater to designers, I decided to focus on building a tool for developers. Slowly but surely it came together, and today it’s available for everyone to use.

Please send your feedback to matt@leandesigns.com. Enjoy!