Hi. I've been using Svelte + Bootstrap to build static sites when a client wanted one. I’m being tempted to use some kind of tool like Webflow or Wordpress + Elementor for this purpose.
The thing is that I still feel I'm faster coding the websites by hand than using these tools, also building them writing the code is free and allows me to keep the price low for the client.
Do you have any experience you can share?
Top comments (18)
I think your current stack is pretty good and even better if you're using a CMS. The maintenance cost is low and with proper use of cached content you can scale to thousands of visits without an increased cost.
In my experience what's most attractive about Webflow is the amount templates, the drag & drop UI and that sort of stuff. But if you're developing the website with Contentful and creating the design yourself, I see no benefit for you.
That’s what I think but people nowadays goes like: ‘You still code websites by hand? That takes a lot of time!’
Idk, I code faster than I drag’n’drop. It’s my experience. Also, I like to have full control over the project.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
I have never understood why people take wordpress for websites. wordpress may make sense for blogs, but for pure static websites?
Of course it always depends on the size, but a site with 20 individual pages without regular updates can be maintained manually quite well.
Well, if you ask me I will still build a blog by myself with the help of a headless CMS. But Wordpress is wrongly used most of the time and overrated.
My freelance website was build with contentful, and the customization and development experience was smoother: raccode.dev
I don't know what webflow is, but wouldn't touch WordPress with a barge pole unless I was cornered. And as much as detest WordPress I didn't know it could build static sites? Or am I misunderstanding "static", as in I though the term referred to plain HTML pages (none of that fan dangled JavaScript stuff 😉).
Same vibe here. But my latest experience is that Wordpress is taking over, is a performance killer and really messy but clients like it. Maybe because they don’t know how rigid it is. I always choose to code websites by hand because of customization, optimization and development experience.
I think your current stack is pretty good. It allows for more flexibility and freedom in terms of what you and your client want.
But if you want to use a website builder, I think WebFlow is better now because of the amazing templates and also the drag and drop UI, I really enjoyed it.
Yep, I had a look to the free demo and it looks pretty cool and customizable. Also, in the premium tier you can export the code and choose the platform where you want to make the deploy.
Use WordPress as backend and React.js for the frontend
Can you elaborate? I don’t know much about Wordpress but wouldn’t that be the same as just getting a MySQL hosting?
So the client wants to have more customisations and freedom to make changes? My advice would be to go with a Headless CMS. Strapi and Sanity are the top 2 in my opinion.
I usually use Contentful for this purpose but I will check those. Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
Contentful is good too! Really great that we have so many choices we only mentioned 3 but there are a lot more than that.
It's faster than coding by hand if you can get the client to accept that their website will look like a $20 theme with little wiggle room. Once they ask for customization it's a highway to hell.
If not (probably not) then you're better off doing custom stuff, which has more added-value anyways (but is harder to find I guess)
They say if you give a developer a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Everyone has an unconscious bias to use the tool they are most comfortable with, even if it's not the right tool for the job!
You would really need to understand the client their needs and these tools to be able to choose the right one.
I would assume however, that these drag and drop tools are pretty good if they want pretty standard websites which leverage the inbuilt templates. And it also allows the client to add more templated pages etc easily with the UI rather than digging into code.
You may want to check out using GraphCMS. It is a dream to work with and has a free tier that covers smaller web projects no problem. I’m currently using it with Svelte and TailwindCSS to create content managed websites for a few small business clients.
Wow, up to 100GB monthly asset traffic and 1 million API calls for free. Incredible, can't thank you enough!
I think CMS will be better for website as you can expend and customize it in future