Hacker News Reader

I once clicked on a restaurant website. It was plain text on an empty background. The only content was their address, phone number, hours, and a link to a PDF of their menu.

The site asked for forgiveness and assured me that it was "under construction". But it was already perfect.

That is pet peeve of mine, getting annoyed by rando pizza places having web page like they are some fancy restaurant.

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.

My sole objection is I'd prefer a non-PDF menu, especially when on mobile.

Also: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website

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less maintainable than if they had used a page builder so it has to be redone every so many years because 'the tech is outdated' aka the team moved on.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 point where thousand of regular articles that should have been written with the standard editor have been written with the page builder and just can't be exported/migrated to a new theme.

Of course, it's an extreme but still...

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.

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.

Once they get into the builder for the page they add all sort of widgets, accordion, tabs that only make sense in the builder theme, etc.

> 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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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!