The Doodlekit website editor is made up of red buttons that link to form-based editors. There is no actual editing of your website in place— instead these buttons just link to forms. These red buttons look bad and they also get in the way of actually seeing your website!
Right: Website Editor
Instead of having elements that you can add to pages, elements have to be an entire page. For example, you add a form page, a gallery page, or a shop page. This makes very little sense. What if you want to a form on the same page that you have a map? It’s just not possible with Doodlekit.
Right: Page Types
Customizing your website is always done in editors that hide the website preview. Which gets so frustrating. Most website builders use a drag and drop editor within your website— so that you can see the changes you are making in a live preview. Doodlekit forces you to customize in abstracted forms. For example, here’s what customizing your page looks like:
Right: Page customization— wish I could see how this looked on the page.
By default every Doodlekit website has a sidebar— which is an outdated idea, most websites today don’t have sidebars. Unfortunately there is no meaningful customization you can do to the sidebar. You can only choose from 5 different “boxes”: Boxes & Notes, Location, Hours of Operation, Social and Login. You really can’t control it beyond that. (The same thing is true with your footer— you just choose to show and hide a series of “boxes” that appear in the footer.)
Right: Sidebar
The Doodlekit website editor is really bad. It’s not thoughtfully designed at all. Some time ago, Doodlekit told me they were in the process of a major overhaul that would launch spring 2015. It still hasn’t launched. Doodlekit needs a lot of work and it’s not at all clear that they are trying to improve it.
Right: Website Editor