This is outdated and suppose you are writing yet another bad page builder. Most argument apply to any technology that do not make a proper use of a component based architecture, code generation or static rendering. For instance Plasmic is adamant to allow compatibility with modern framework such as Next.js and even has been a pioneer in the field of static personalization, a very performant approach.
Page builders might not be a good idea
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here medium to larger businesses are not the size as those in the US, but many of them here use page builders as well. There has been quite some backlash to the 'professionally coded web-presence'; long and frustrating processes and the end result is less maintainable than if they had used a page builder so it has to be redone every so many years because 'the tech is outdated' aka the team moved on.
I am in the position of "managing" for clients a fleet of ~200 websites built with a page builder. Every clients has the key to the kingdom and websites have diverged from their original look and feel. The brand recognition we sought for them is all out the window and steering back the whole fleet to a uniform design is impossible. The page builder allowed them to change everything and so they did. It's now up to a p…
We worked with a large EU firm with multiple offices in every EU country (and a few outside in larger Europe); their headoffice had a bespoke CMS made for them; a huge monster of a thing that was very costly.. The goal of the head office in doing that was to make sure there is consistent branding and design across all the company in all the countries. This inability to not 'stand out' as a company annoyed the branches so much that they all use wp or pagebuilders for the site; cheaper, faster, customisable etc. The cms is only used in the originating country. No-one ones this uniformity that management wants.
Also extreme I guess, but we did a lot of sites for companies where a single company has > 1000 sites (branch, departmental, intranets etc); the head office always starts with 'this is great, we want a cms that has a few templates and we don't want anyone to steer away from that', only to have the complete opposite a year later. We gave up telling them upfront a long time ago as it made us lose the pitch (seems we don't trust our product), but we have 0 companies in the past 20 years that stuck with 'uniformity / brand recognition' lark across the board. With or without page builders.
What I do not like is the waste of content; even when you use custom stuff (wp or what not), you can still make sure the content is stored in json/markdown or something in a central cms.
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#13Hello, founder and CTO of www.shopstory.app here. None if these arguments apply if you build page builder right. I believe we're on the right path.
First, it works inside of headless CMSes. It means that you get all advantages of structured content and yet add sprinkles of unstructured content when you need on top of that. You can always connect structured data into visual blocks built with Shopstory.
As for design consistency we build everything around design tokens. Not only fonts and colors but also page margins, grid gaps etc. Also, you will soon have permission system where designers can build templates but editors can't modify visual properties.
The bottom line is that I believe in the future we won't need to make a tradeoff between visual vs structured. You can have both at the same time and just fine tune the system to whatever direction suits you better.
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#14> The content is not reusable (you cannot reuse content on other pages).
> The design is not consistent (pages often don’t look the same).
> The site is not maintainable (change on one page doesn’t propagate to other pages).
> The content is not maintainable (the content cannot be easily extracted from the database).
> The site is not very performant (page builders load a lot of extra assets).
All the above depends on the tool that's used. I've set up many sites that had page builder features but didn't have these drawbacks. Certainly there's many other tools out there. What OP seems to be talking about are page builders that output and store raw html.
> There’s always a missing feature (page builders cannot solve all your problems).
True, but that goes for literally anything you can use to build websites, all the way down to the HTML spec. And extending the page builder is often possible with professional help.
> Getting to know page builder doesn’t make you a developer (leave the job to a professional).
Developers are not by definition a professional in all aspects of page creation. A user well versed in, say, WordPress, will know about the drawbacks as well, and know how to mitigate them.
I'm not a big fan of page builders myself, but there's a place and time for these tools. I'm currently working with a team to implement a 1.000 page website in contentful and react, based on similar thinking as OP. It's an absolute shit show and it feels like being the hostage of 'professional developers'.
In the end the most important is to choose the right tool for the job, and there's a place for these page builders.
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#15> The content is not reusable (you cannot reuse content on other pages). > The design is not consistent (pages often don’t look the same). > The site is not maintainable (change on one page doesn’t propagate to other pages). > The content is not maintainable (the content cannot be easily extracted from the database). > The site is not very performant (page builders load a lot of extra assets). All the above depends o…
I simple mix and match. Almost all page builders have shortcodes or codeblocks in some shape way or form. I can do easy things the easy way or use code plumbing where necessary. Pick the right tool for the job is a skill by itself I always found (that and everything takes twice as long as you think it does)
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#16> I don’t want to offend anyone here, but building pages is more than just writing content and placing it somewhere on the page. You should leave this job to a professional, especially if you want to maintain the site on a longer run. But this use case of simply getting some content accessible on the web is the primary reason why page builders are so popular :) For example, a large number small of businesses just wan…
What page builders are any good these days (let's assume the use case is your nephew example)?
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#17>I am referring to the WordPress and Shopify ecosystems here
>The content is not reusable (you cannot reuse content on other pages)
Not sure I understand this. Platforms like WordPress certainly have widgets, reusable blocks, shared headers/footers, and so on.
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#18>I am referring to the WordPress and Shopify ecosystems here >The content is not reusable (you cannot reuse content on other pages) Not sure I understand this. Platforms like WordPress certainly have widgets, reusable blocks, shared headers/footers, and so on.
Maybe what they’re referring to is your own content? Can you create your own reusable blocks
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#19>I am referring to the WordPress and Shopify ecosystems here >The content is not reusable (you cannot reuse content on other pages) Not sure I understand this. Platforms like WordPress certainly have widgets, reusable blocks, shared headers/footers, and so on.
Maybe what they’re referring to is your own content? Can you create your own reusable blocks
Re: Page builders might not be a good idea
#20> I don’t want to offend anyone here, but building pages is more than just writing content and placing it somewhere on the page. You should leave this job to a professional, especially if you want to maintain the site on a longer run. But this use case of simply getting some content accessible on the web is the primary reason why page builders are so popular :) For example, a large number small of businesses just wan…
> I get that the original post is basically a sales pitch, but there is huge value to be had from page builders and it's dishonest not to mention it. What's dishonest is this passage: > For example, a large number small of businesses just want simple page displaying their working hours and some pictures of inventory. If you go to a "professional development agency" and ask them to build you a site with just these fea…
What is dishonest about my example use-case and personal anecdote?