Sitely, Visual Web Design for Android

I bought a Sparkle Basic license back in late 2021 and now every time I launch the app to make updates to my website, there's a new function I can't use without upgrading my license. It's fine to charge for new functionality, but honor the licensing you sold to your customers in the (recent!) past.

I purchased Sparkle a while back and started to build a website! Soon I realised that this is going to be a lot of work!! because software does not automaically resize the design from desktop version to mobile version. You need to manually adjust for each page and that was not what I expected. Creating a responsive website with Sparkle is a lot of work. EverWeb software does it easier but it is a bit buggy. Also image gallery in Sparkle is very limited specially for a photographer!!

I purchased Sparkle Pro (3.X) for $75 or $85 or something yet have lost access to SEO features that were previously available to me. Apparently, the developer has worked too hard to give me access to a feature I already had. Had to be taken away. There are some other features unavailable to me, such as so called "Developer Tools" which actually means basic control over your web pages through CSS and JavaScript among others. The best you mere mortals get is heavily abstracted and sloppy code. Also, this pricing structure is incredibly convoluted only because the developer is such a penny pincher. While initially I was thrilled to have access to these features on a local application, it's been made clear I don't own anything. The developer will either lock you in with a subscription or just ignore your license and slowly remove features anyway. The static sites this generator creates are completely non-responsive. The best this thing can do is generate different layouts (that you manually create, painstakingly, for every page) which activate on different breakpoints. Quite frankly, I thought the developer would fix this glaring omission, but clearly it won't be until version 5 or 6, by that time you'd have spent many hundreds of dollars on a subpar website from a subpar builder. This app needs a complete rethinking of its core structure from top to bottom to build more responsive and properly formatted pages. The web isn't meant to work like a Photoshop document. While I didn't know that at the time, due to my own incompetence with HTML and CSS, the developer clearly did, and chose to design this subpar experience instead of investing in layout technology that makes sense with today's HTML and CSS expectations like every other WYSIWYG creator. Speaking of HTML and CSS, at this point you'd be better off learning some of that (it's not that hard) and actually taking ownership of your site. While you may not be able to code an entire website from scratch, you could at least understand the technologies behind the web before exploring this option which takes all of the freedom of the web (and a lot of money from your wallet). It's better to either use a hosting provider's WYSIWYG for really simple yet effective sites, or try something like WebFlow, which is amusingly 10x more capable but less restrictive in terms of licensing. (And doesn't hide the HTML and CSS). This is just too restrictive and the pricing is too annoying. It's like paying to be imprisoned.

I have only been using this app for less that 2 weeks and have been able to almost complete 4 sites. This app blows anything like it away. I have tried to many to count apps that promise to make it as easy to use as this app but fail way short on that promise. This has everything I need plus some and provides it in a friendly UI that is super intuitive. I own several micro businesses that don't make enough for me to spend hundreds of dollars a month to pay a developer to maintain or create a website but this app has put the power I need in my hands to do it myself. Don't bother looking further, this is the app you want if you need an easy website builder.

This is by far the most intuitive, flexible, and simple software I have ever used to build a website (and I have used many). It keeps improving with each update! Support, when needed, has been fast and very helpful. I find it a much beeter tool to build websites than WordPress.