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Page builders might not be a good idea

silvestar.codes

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Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#21

Post by jeffparsons »

I find this whole thing thoroughly unconvincing. Page builders provide enormous value for a modest price. If you run into an insurmountable problem with one, you could rebuild your whole site on a different platform (including manually copying over all the content), and then do that again a few more times, and still spend far less than you would having an agency develop a bespoke site with the latest trendy tech that will be obsolete next month anyway.

The fraction of businesses that need something really custom/special is vanishingly small. And the fraction of businesses that need a pixel-perfect design and consistency across all their pages is tiny, too. Your customers don't care about that crap nearly as much as you do. Just keep it simple and make the information they're looking for easy to find.

I'm a software engineer. I love building stuff. I can make kick-ass web stuff if called upon to do so. But please, don't waste your money paying me to build something you don't need.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#22

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

tyingq wrote: post #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.

I think their objections are deeper than that. I haven't used wordpress for ages, but they're talking about 'drag and drop builders' which I'd associate more with wix or Squarespace than wordpress.

Fundamentally, I think the issue is that it's very hard to achieve modularisation, especially via a gui, if the client doesn't understand or care about it.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#23

Post by debesyla »

darreninthenet wrote: post #16
lpapez wrote: post #3

> 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)?

For wordpress: Elementor (easy to use, easy to find devs for it) and my personal favorite Thrive Architect (and their other plugins), that I like because of all the nifty marketing tools, ease of a/b testing. Both of these are visual builders, in a WYSIWYG sense. (There's also Divi, which is popular, but in my experience it somehow creates slow/laggy pages.)

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#24

Post by darreninthenet »

debesyla wrote: post #23
darreninthenet wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What page builders are any good these days (let's assume the use case is your nephew example)?

For wordpress: Elementor (easy to use, easy to find devs for it) and my personal favorite Thrive Architect (and their other plugins), that I like because of all the nifty marketing tools, ease of a/b testing. Both of these are visual builders, in a WYSIWYG sense. (There's also Divi, which is popular, but in my experience it somehow creates slow/laggy pages.)

Many thanks!

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#25

Post by totalhack »

Almost none of the complaints are true of Webflow, FWIW. It's by no means perfect, but there are many use cases where it is a much smarter decision than contracting or hiring a site engineer.

Sprinkle in some custom widgets as needed and you can get pretty far (albeit not with optimal page speed performance).

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#26

Post by BiteCode_dev »

There are many things that can be done better by experts.

But to double the quality, you multiply by 10 the cost.

E.G: I wanted to start writing again. I had an idea for the entire structure of the site, and pretty neat features I only could get if I coded it myself.

Then I started to feel like writing, so I wrote. As usual, it took hours, then I had to go back to my life.

I was now left with the choice of not publishing for months, and being frustrated in the writing process, or just use a ready-made platform.

I chose the latter. I went to substack. And publish the first of the 3 articles I already wrote. Next week, I will be able to publish the next ones, and write more.

Because it turns out I want to write and publish more than I want to code a publication platform. No matter how awesome the platform was going to be in my head.

So page builder are a very good idea. Because we don't live in a universe without constraints, and most humanity has to make Pareto choices.

It's just a trade off, as usual in IT.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#27

Post by johnchristopher »

lpapez wrote: post #20
johnchristopher wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

You make it sounds like it's the norm and pass it as a valid argument but it does sound more like a passed down urban legend, not even personal. Or what went on is something more like "a buddy of mine contacted that big agency for their small one-page website and he was told they don't take projects under 200k because they work for big clients and big complex projects, lol can you believe they ask 200k for a small website?" and that became "agency asked 200k for small website" anecdote.

Anyway, this anecdote doesn't fit with the field and it's at best a really rare exception, not representative and not relevant. So I found it dishonest to bring it up like that in this context.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#29

Post by is_true »

tyingq wrote: post #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.

WordPress has drag and drop theme "builders" (Elementor and others.). He is probably referring to that.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#30

Post by notahacker »

lpapez wrote: post #20
johnchristopher wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't know about dishonest, but it's ludicrously unrepresentative when there are tens thousands of agencies that specialise in doing quick one pagers or ten pagers for very little money, sometimes as a loss leader to try to sell them other stuff.

It's like insisting that you won't get a car to take you to the supermarket for less than $200k based on experience of enquiring about the availability of cheap runarounds but only at supercar dealerships

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