Blog design engine Ownzee cool, but could use some structure

It’s like a visual blogging app. Remember a few months ago, when we featured a service called Webdoc? Well, we had a lot of fun with that. We saw a lot of potential for the idea of allowing people to design posts on the fly (sort of a next-generation Tumblr or Storify), though the service had a few things we thought it could improve upon. Ownzee appears to be using better, less-cumbersome technology for its format. Here’s a roundup.

• The good First off, the wide-screen format appears to be using a rich-text editor reminiscent of Aloha, and appears to be easier to use. You can do cooler things with more real estate, obviously, though we think the font palette is a little lacking. (No Helvetica?) It’s clear that, though it’s similar to Webdoc, it’s built from a stronger starting point. As they improve the service, this will prove beneficial.
• The bad Unlike Webdoc, Ownzee appears not to support external HTML or CSS, which would extend the format a bit. However, this wouldn’t be an issue if the service offered easy-to-build templates, so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time. As a result, the format lends itself less to doing serious cool things and more to being a social meme-maker like Canvas. It doesn’t have to be this way, guys!
• The unfortunate Sadly, The dealbreaker for us is the price — we like the idea, but wonder if charging a $5 monthly fee for this is the way to go. Unlike SquareSpace, you can only do so much with the format in its current iteration, which makes the technology, cool as it is, a little less-useful. Our suggestion: Make it freemium, then offer InDesign-style design tools (grids, rules, extra fonts) for a fee. source

» Overall thoughs: There is a market for a good, serious, on-the-fly design tool that takes the lessons from CMS tools like Tumblr and WordPress and converts them to a totally-visual HTML5-only format. The thing that we see right now is not that tools like WebDoc and Ownzee are bad ideas — far from it — but that their scope is too limited. These design tools, while quite advanced, lack structure and full context. If we were Ownzee, we’d be looking to offer ways to quickly structure designs – say, grids, good templates, solid themes and ways to prevent end-users from repeating themselves — that would give it print-design-style conventions. This is why Storify (which basically does this with social-media storytelling) is taking off. Just think how much better posts like these would look if end-users had starting points. We’d certainly use something like that.

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