Testing AI Website Builder Forma 💻

All right, so I just kind of wanted to talk about kind of my experience here overall when I'm not trying to just build like an insane infinite scrolling carousel or a fully building website editor- I guess not an editor, but a website for myself, for my company, where people are selecting things and it's building a website in front of them.

So just like, what would this look like for a client.

So my brother's a state trooper, and he's trying to start a, you know, landscaping company so he can make some money on the side.

this is what he's gonna call it.

he's been- he, he's still waiting for licensing and stuff, so he's not even close to getting it really up.

But, he has no idea that I'm doing this.

This is just kind of- I was like, let me, let me see what would happen if I was building this for like an actual client.

So I built a website and I designed this homepage in Figma.

Then I had Figma- I put Figma into Claude, the Figma file in Claude.

I had Claude generate the rest of the pages for me, and then, in Claude Design.

And I do think that that would be a major thing to add because one of my favorite things about, Framer is like Framer has Framer Design where you can- it's basically Figma or Claude design built right in.

That would be super awesome if we had Forma Design.

That would be really cool.

And then I could like do prototyping and designing and pages and and layout and all that stuff before we like commit it to an actual live website.

That would be really awesome.

But that was the workflow I did.

I went Figma to Claude, Claude built out the rest of these pages, and then I zipped it.

And threw it into Forma.

Forma generated this incredible website for me, and I wanted to kind of see what would happen after that.

So I started going through like one by one.

I wanted to kind of test some of the tools I really like.

So at first, the demo for- I don't know, Magic Select is what I'm kind of calling it.

This is like developer or something up here, developer mode enabled.

But I think I I call it Smart Select or something, and I will say that like I love and hate it.

I think that the tool is really awesome.

Originally I had like 2 buttons up here, so I had smart select, remove a button, and then also this hover effect on this button didn't work, so I smart selected it and then made it work and it was great.

And like things like that are awesome because I don't have to dig into the code, I don't have to figure out why.

It was incredible for things like that.

However, where it's really tedious is like changing text.

I I would use it a lot for changing text, but like to Smart Select and then have to go into the code, like go into the chat and say like remove it, period, or like change this word is really tedious.

excuse me.

so that was pretty pretty good.

But overall, I really enjoyed Smart Select.

I would love it to be able to just take it and like use it when I need, but changing like, you know, text or images and things like that shouldn't, shouldn't need it.

settings, I could talk about that later, but overall settings has been really good too, and I think it's easier to find.

I think navigating some of these menus is way better than current Squarespace, actually, believe it or not.

Now, one of the things that I don't- maybe I don't remember seeing any demo or anything, but this page map is really awesome.

And so I really like this page map because it's breaking it up into sections.

And some of these sections, it even- like this section, for example, has its own context.

And then I can change the context, right in here, which, Formidable, which I really love because that's just like a really great way to solve a solution like this.

And what I love about it is like, that is excellent for client handoff.

Like, just being able to like make a video and be like, you can click this section and then type this in, and it just changes it right there.

And they don't have to mess with the design, worry about if it looks great on all the screen sizes.

Like, I thought that was excellent.

So, some of it I can see, like, like this would be great if it it just brought me back to chat, but it'd be nice if it did a better job of generating ways to fix that in these, in the page map, which I thought was really great.

I also really like this, this, the the page, you know, the page map I thought was really great also.

But I do have a quite amount of pages here.

They all kind of look the same.

So it'd be nice to maybe sort them or organize them or even just put them in a list view would be really nice.

yeah, really tired.

Sorry, I I don't mean to be yawning on camera.

So the- yeah, it would be nice to maybe group them, maybe put them in folders, list view, change this.

So the more and more- and this is only 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 pages.

Like, some of these websites we build are insane.

It would be impossible to find stuff.

So overall, I really like it, but would love to see it be able to get organized.

And the Wayback Machine, I want to talk about this.

So this is cool because one of the ideas I had, and I get a lot of this from clients of mine, they're like, hey, what can we do to like personalize the site a little bit and make something like, you know, fun for Halloween or Christmas or whatever.

So I had Forma recreate our website, this website here.

And again, this is just a nice website for like an actual business, nothing like super crazy.

But being able to create like an immersive experience like this, with this insane scroll effect or this scroll effect, or even just some of these button effects, you know, were almost not possible in Squarespace before without like insane levels of knowledge of code and a lot of testing.

So that's really great.

But what I did was I wanted to test this way, like the Wayback Machine kind of thing, the time machine, and we're gonna re-put our you know, restore this just because I wanted to kind of see what it would look like.

And so I, I asked Forma to make it a, like a Halloween theme.

And this was really cool, and it did a really good job.

And I can just see like this could be great for clients, like, hey, let's just transform our website for Halloween.

And it was really cool, made all- it changed the color scheme, we had some leaves falling, the text became all like spooky, the The colors kind of went, like this just looks awesome.

You got little spider webs, and and I think like clients of mine would love this.

You know, it's just another way to stand out and be a little bit different.

And I thought it was cool, and what's great for me as a designer or as a person that's maintaining this is like I would never do this before because I'd have to rebuild the entire website in for Halloween and then turn it back and maybe duplicate the page and just all the stuff.

But with the time machine, I could just go back, restore this, and yeah, this was awesome.

Now obviously we know we, you know, restoring it and stuff is for making crazy changes and going back.

So this way the site's always stored.

But I thought that this was really, really awesome.

And maybe the biggest thing that I love the most is the device view.

I lived in this for a while here.

Like, I love that I could see it in laptop, tablet, phone, and even widescreen, which was really, really, really Welcome Edition.

I also love, you know, this is very Squarespace, but I do really love opening it into a new window.

I think that that's really great, like really great.

And I like it.

I actually found myself using that more because then this way I didn't have to constantly keep doing this and I could just keep living in the editor.

And I thought that that was really great.

and one thing I really want to talk about, like just setting this up in general, I did try to- and maybe this because it's in beta I tried this build twice.

I I set it up as a a fully separate build the second time.

The first time I tried to build like a second space and have it build out a full like custom invoicing software, and it just failed.

It just couldn't do it.

And I'm I'm assuming that's just because it was in beta, but would love to chat about that if anybody would like to chat.

Or about me trying to build out the invoicing system.

So that was just one area where I found that it, it kind of failed.

But overall, like, this was great.

Like, just being able to go through and like change- like, originally I had quarter radius and just saying like, hey, change the quarter radius of everything to not have it at all.

And creating- just overall, the experience here was incredible.

I would- this would- I would- one, I would never be able to build a website like this probably before, and on top of it, at this speed.

And of this quality would be almost impossible.

And I think being able to give this to a client much faster and better is a win for everybody.

Another thing I really liked was I looking through the connectors, I connected all of like Google, it connected beautifully and quick and I thought all of that was really great.

The database, building the databases out was awesome, worked really great, everything was excellent here.

people, I didn't add any of that stuff.

but analytics was great.

Now, contact forms.

This is where I want to talk about.

I built the form out and and made the submissions and all of this.

and I tested them, which was great, and they worked really good.

But the problem with that is if I go to free estimate, this is something I really loved about, like, truly love about Formo was, you know, they they might need a very specialized type of contact form.

So we have like services, properties, contacts, reviews.

What can I help with?

and so I built out this like 3-step thing where they can click multiple things.

continue, we can choose different variations and then type in this info.

And then I would hit review request.

and then go to submit it.

And what was cool is this is like, you could, they could review all the steps and everything.

And it kept failing, like it wouldn't work.

And so I asked Forma why, and it was because when I originally had Forma build it, I just had name and it wasn't like first name and last name.

And then the same thing with address.

I had address and it was just one form and not address, city, state, zip.

And Formidable said that it wouldn't accept it unless it was separated and then it was written like this.

And that's okay because I figured that out, but I feel like that could be really bad for a lot of people if they don't know.

And then they're like, my form works and I set up my form storage and all this stuff and it's supposed to work.

And then they make the website live and they're like, why are my things not coming in?

It like it just wouldn't- like it literally would not let me submit a contact form at all.

and I think that might be something that can either be bypassed in the back end of what Forma is allowed to do, or it- Forma doesn't build a- won't build a form unless those- it's set up like that, like default.

I found that to be a little bit frustrating.

Another thing that was And like, again, I know it's a beta, so I'm not stressing it.

Like, I'm sure that'll get worked out, but now that I know, and this is kind of why I'm glad that I did this, like as like a building a client, a whole client brief kind of thing.

I also tested agents and setting them up.

So I did the contact form.

I attempted to test the contact form myself, but I'll just fill this in really quickly.

Because I do want to say that this was cool.

Fills in all the stuff.

Let's just do test review request.

And so I thought this was awesome that I could build this out so very easily and then hit send my request in, which was awesome.

And then, you know, I built all this out.

I built this entire thing, which just makes me super pumped because I have so many clients that ask for very specific things.

And I can't wait to build more apps and backends and and specific tools that they need that will just work exceptionally.

And it was great because the form came right here like it was supposed to.

And one of the biggest things that I loved the most when I tested the forms was if you click on forms, I can see them, and then I can click in there and see which one went to the form.

And I thought that that was super awesome.

but one thing that I want to talk about that I think is really not good, and maybe I'm just kind of not knowing how to do this, or I don't know what the issue is, but I have this set up to a very- like, I didn't want to set it up to my Vative email, so I set this up to one- my art email, like, like as an artist.

And, yeah, the, the, the- it does not send it.

Like, it, it doesn't send the notification to the email that you got a note, like, like a form was filled out.

And, and I've been trying to go back and forth with the agent to- or with chat to figure out why that would work, and it just doesn't.

It it doesn't work no matter what.

And I have Google, like my Google Workspace, my Google Gmail, Sheets, Drive, all of it is connect like connected.

I think you can even see in the connectors it is all indeed connected.

See, so, and it will not like for whatever reason send the email to here.

And then I even in chat told them, I told chat to do it.

Like if a form was sent out, it needs to be sent.

Like I love all of this.

I think this is all really great.

That you can archive it, you can see this info, close it.

And this is- this right here is a feature that clients of mine have been asking for years, of being able to just go in and see the forms and not have it in a Google Sheet or something, and then also see what forms are doing well.

Loved all that, but it not going to their email is kind of a problem.

So that I think needs to be- I don't know if it's just a beta thing, I'm not really sure, but that's frustrating.

I also tried to set up the agent to work 24/7.

And look at inboxes and stuff and the form submissions every 1 minute because I just wanted to see if I could get it to send an email, a follow-up email, reply to something, any of that stuff.

And it didn't do anything at all.

Like, it just wouldn't work for me.

and again, it might be a user, might be me setting it up wrong, but I'm not 100% sure, what the issue is there.

So I just ended up telling Chat to turn off all agents.

They should all be off at this point.

Yeah.

They're all off.

So I really like what we have here and being able to do all this and trying to attempt that.

But I would love to be able to actually test the agents.

I would love to be able to see why my forms aren't going to where they are.

but yeah, overall, like thoroughly, thoroughly impressed.

This website is really cool.

really, really, really pumped.

Like custom forms, custom CMSs, like things that just work all the time.

Like building out custom, like, you know, filtering was very easy.

you know, hover effects with- just all of it, just, it just, it was a really good experience overall.

I can't, I can't complain.

and then there's that super sick animation.

Yeah, I didn't even show anybody that.

I did make this animation, which is really cool too, to, to load up the home page.

and it's super smooth.

It's, I mean, it's truly, this is, this is, these are the kind of websites I've been, I've been, been wanting to build easier for a long time.

And Forma seems like it's gonna get there.

Now price obviously is a thing and all of those things.

Not every website might be perfect for Forma, but yeah, overall thoroughly impressed.