Page builders might not be a good idea • Hacker News Board

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#41

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:23 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #8

anonzzzies wrote: post #4

Earlier 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less maintainable than if they had used a page builder so it has to be redone every so many years because 'the tech is outdated' aka the team moved on.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…

Why can't the content be extracted? This makes little sense to me, as you could just even extract content from raw HTML by crawling the websites.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#42

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:27 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #27

lpapez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

Then there are others where you go pay 10k and get a WordPress spaghetti that no one else is willing to take on because it just is done completely out of standards of WP.

So how do you as a small business owner even know whether the agency you pay 10k is giving you good and maintainable code?

in 2 years when you want changes you'll realise that no one wants to work on this or if they do, they will ask much more, and the previous agency might be willing to take it on, but they will have the leverage to ask even more.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#43

Post by taeric » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

I've long been building the contrary position. Our industry has taken massive steps backwards by not embracing content creation tools in our pipelines. Imagine if game devs insisted on art being hand crafted triangle by triangle?

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#44

Post by navane » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #30

lpapez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

don't those agencies use the page builders though?

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#45

Post by keithalewis » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

Paying Web "Designers" Might Not Be a Good Idea. This is just a sign of their dwindling business.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#46

Post by notahacker » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

navane wrote: post #44

notahacker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

don't those agencies use the page builders though?

Think most of them use WordPress, which may or may not fit into people's ideas of page builders. tbh most of the OP's criticisms about composability and maintainability and feature completeness don't really matter for five page sites anyway, but an agency using a CMS template likely has the advantage of having some idea how sections and inheritance etc work, and more design skill in creating and using building blocks than the DIY-er.

And if you actually need something hand rolled using authentic vanilla HTML and artisanal node frameworks you can still get it for less than $200k :)

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#47

Post by yaaang » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

eric-burel wrote: post #11

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.

Thanks for the mention of Plasmic!

Indeed, I believe there's a lot of innovation to be had by page builders - Plasmic's approach is to blur the lines between the codebase and the visual editor, so we try to directly confront the myriad issues laid out by three OP.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#48

Post by rchaud » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

> And that is the seventh problem: using a page builder doesn’t make you a developer. Developers and users don’t think alike. Developers’ brain works completely different, and it is always trying to solve problems in the most efficient way. Experienced developers predict and anticipate problems way before they emerge.

Someone should let the WP Core devs know, because the page builder SaaSes have been eating their lunch delivering on business website needs while Automattic lurches from one disaster to another with their "dev-friendly" Gutenberg full site editor.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#49

Post by rchaud » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

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?

for the use case youre describing, there are about a hundred listings on Fiverr (agencies participate there too) that will get the job done for $1000.

Re: Page builders might not be a good idea

#50

Post by rchaud » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #33

crop_rotation wrote: post #32

I think the article misses the point that people just want to get things done. Particularly this point is so naive: > using a page builder doesn’t make you a developer. People who are using page builders are not doing to pass the arbitrary qualifications of being a developer. They just want to get something done and getting a developer to create a performant page is just so much more expensive. Even within big compan…

That makes it sound completely naive but I think that conclusion would be too rash. it seems like the author has some audience in mind. Perhaps himself after trying a page builder.

It seems to me that this part of the article is a swipe at young people using page builders to create websites in hopes of passing themselves off as a developer.