Page builders might not be a good idea
silvestar.codes
silvestar.codes
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 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 features, you will get a quote for 200 thousand dollars upwards (speaking from experience). With page builders, you can get your nephew to build you a site during school off-season and it will be infinetly better than having no site at all and still probably do the job well enough as a professionally built one.
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.
Of course, it's an extreme but still...
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.
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 features, you will get a quote for 200 thousand dollars upwards (speaking from experience).
edit: unless the agency preemptively fired problematic clients :), take the hint
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.
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.
Like in any other industry: you network and connect and consult with people before knocking on any random agency door.
I don't ring a random plumber, I ask a friend or two if they know someone who's reliable.
Also, you need to add maintenance to your budget.
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
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 :)
The site asked for forgiveness and assured me that it was "under construction". But it was already perfect.
Landing page like SV startup, photo gallery.
Hell, give me the menu and phone number, you can drop photo links of your food somewhere in menu.
> 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 companies some departments leverage these because getting developer bandwidth is just too expensive for most of these use cases.
As a web designer / FE developer and wordpress developer, I am happy they exist because they’re great business. The client starts with one template picked at random based on the wrong assumption that what you see in the frontend is tied to the template, two months in they realize that the marketing claims of Elementor or Divi or whatev where BS, and get frustrated about the unholy mess they’ve made. That’s when I get usually called in - mostly via word of mouth - to “fix the mess”. What I usually do is guide the client through why having a custom theme with flexible repeatable components is a much better idea. Then we sit down and we make a complete content outline to better structure what they’ve been scattering around the site in different pages with no separation of concerns between content, structure and graphic design (99% of the time this is really the problem they didn’t know they needed to solve first!). After that, I get to refactor the site into a lean, SEO-friendly structure, and finally I can sell them a small retainer for maintenance, because they finally understood that two hours of their time are worth MORE than a few hundred dollars they pay to a professional to keep the machine humming
So I guess yeah, thanks DIVI and Elementor?
Not only is it naive but based on the sad, self-centric failure to understand the original purpose of the web as a means for publishing hypertext.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
And since none of the problems presented here are new or unique to sites built with page builders, it follows that the others ideas don’t actually solves them.
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.
I don’t think site-level consistency is as important or prevalent as you’d think.
The few page/site builders that use dynamic data, such as Duda (in part) and Builder.io very much reflect the cost difference, from 10€ of standard page builders to 99€-449€/mo for builder.io.
I'd say that there are builders that solve every one of his points, but they are very costly.
Sprinkle in some custom widgets as needed and you can get pretty far (albeit not with optimal page speed performance).
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.
Nowadays these are "UX/UI designers" who most likely will also be not that needed soon.
Getting to know page builder doesn’t make you a developer
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.