Tips for Visual Building Tools That Increase the Coding Efficiency

by admin

A website designer wanted to know if anyone could recommend a static site builder as an alternative to WordPress. This person went on to say that they are half of a team of two hobbyists who make small websites for clients. The individual asking the community takes care of the server aspects, HTML and CSS. Their partner does the graphic design. Their flow of work involves self-hosting a few WordPress installations. The partner designs graphics in a page builder in WordPress. This individual later refines them with custom CSS or HTML. Neither of them has experience in JavaScript other than copy and pasting from the work of other web designers who share their code.

This individual has noticed that for some of their clients, a static site is a better option. They noticed that a static site generator with headless CMS could help. What they are looking for is a visual building tool that is reproducible so they can feel at home and reuse their own designs without having to start from scratch. They would also like the solution to have some open source software they can host on their own. The static site would be hosted on one of their CDNs. They asked a large online community what the best solution or closest solution would be for meeting these needs.

One person replied with a suggestion for the original poster to take a look at WebFlow. Another person seconded this suggestion, stating that its CMS is good and the page designer tool is flexible.

A different person had a recommendation for GrapesJS. They noted that it is particularly useful when a person wants to export code and does not want to have to pay to do it, like one has to pay WebFlow.

Someone else suggested GatsbyJS and Strapi, DatoCMS or Contentful as a plugin or add-on service. A person added onto this, saying that GatsbyJS is useful, but the original poster would need to learn React and some GraphQL in order to make the most of it. GatsbyJS also doesn’t have a visual builder wanted by the poster.

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