We still can’t believe it, but we did it: Sitely 7 is on iPad!
Today is a special day.
After 9 months of hard work and quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears, we managed to do something that, just a year ago, we would never have thought possible: yesterday we released our app, Sitely AI + Visual Website Builder, on iPad.
Sitely for macOS is a complex and sophisticated app, and bringing it to such a different platform — even though the two share the same DNA — was no easy challenge.
Of course, we won’t pretend we could have done it in less than a year without the help of Codex and Claude — it would probably have taken us at least two years, if not three. But the amount of work involved was still enormous.
We had to take apart, rethink and rebuild the entire UI; revisit our whole website management pipeline to reduce memory usage to the bare minimum, since memory is such a precious resource on iPad; write custom implementations for features that needed to work differently, such as website publishing; and add entirely new capabilities, including full Apple Pencil support.
Here’s the launch post for the iPad version, written by my partner in this fantastic adventure, Duncan Wilcox:
https://sitely.app/blog/introducing-sitely-7.html
We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve managed to build. I hope our users will love it too — especially those discovering Sitely for the first time on iPad — and that they’ll share their feedback and ideas with us, helping us make it even better and better suited to their needs.
Finally, I’ll leave you with a small request for 10 seconds of your time: if you can, please help us give this project a little more visibility by giving us an upvote on Product Hunt:
producthunt.com/products/sitely-ipad-ai-visual-website-builder
The iPad expansion is a big product bet after that much rebuilding.
Curious whether the motivation is mostly serving existing Sitely users on another device, or whether you’re expecting iPad to bring in a meaningfully different audience.
Hi Aryan, thanks for your comment! Yes, the iPad version is definitely a bet. We hope to get positive feedback from our existing users, many of whom have asked for an iPad version over the years, but our bigger bet is on reaching an entirely new audience.
We’re not yet sure whether iPad is the right platform for this kind of tool, or whether there’s a large enough audience looking to build complete websites on it. What we do know is that Sitely feels surprisingly natural on iPad: its visual approach works beautifully with touch and Apple Pencil, and in some ways interacting directly with the canvas feels even more immediate than using a mouse.
It’s still too early to say whether the bet will pay off, but that’s exactly what we’re hoping to find out. So far, we’re very happy with what we’ve built — now we need to see what iPad users think!
That makes sense. The fact that the iPad experience may actually feel better for the visual workflow is probably the most interesting part of the bet.