I just found this 👉 'Building a design product for non-designers, why would you do that?'. Melanie Perkins the founder of Canva talking about some of the objections they faced from investors in the early days x.com/pootlepress/status/1752202251706233141?s=20
This sounds like a great idea. Here are a few thoughts. First of all is the distinction between content and design. I always strive to make it easy for my clients to update their content themselves. To do this, I make quite a bit of use of Advanced Custom Fields to give them a backend that's easy to use for adding and changing content. On some sites I use Divi and show them how to edit the content on the page using the Divi front end editor. So, my model is to give them the design and structure and put in the initial content, then teach them how to do updates. In reality, a lot of them still ask me to make content changes. They either don't want to be bothered, or they get too confused, which is understandable since they seldom do these activities, so they quickly forget what I've showed them. (Even when I make an instructional video, they often don't even bother to watch it.) As far as giving them the kind of simple design capabilities you envision, on one hand, I think there are DIY clients who would love to have the capabilities, especially those who are trying to spend as little money as possible. On the other hand, I think a lot of the beginners will want someone else to do it for them. So, when considering the market for this, I would say that not all beginners are really potential users. Some will have difficulty even though it will seem quite simple to us. For example, my wife, after years of using a computer for writing, still can't grasp cut and paste. And even though I've shown her multiple times how to bring up her Google calendar to find an entry that has the Zoom link for a meeting, about half the time, she asks me to come in and find it for her. On the other hand, there are probably plenty of non-technical beginners who would probably use a product like this. I'm thinking of all the people I see who are musicians, artists, or have small businesses who use Wix or Squarespace to do a site by themselves. I often think, they could do so much better if they would have me do it for them, but that's how it is. Another market beyond beginners is for web designers, and web developers who do small business sites, or sites for friends and family. For me, I am now looking at converting my Divi sites to the 2024 theme. (Thank you for all your FSE videos!) If I had a builder like what you are describing, I would be very likely to try it. With Divi I can put together really nice sites with lots of cool bells and whistles very quickly. If I could do that with a different page builder that was simple and had less bloat, even if there were fewer bells and whistles, I would be inclined to use it. (One of the reasons I still use Divi a lot is that, way back when, I bought a lifetime unlimited license on sale.) All in all, I think it could be a good project. Off the top of my head, I have no clue how to do it, other than a guess that it will take a lot of JavaScript programming. But I haven't really thought it through. If you build this, I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
That's an amazing idea! Why unskilled people who have never even opened a graphic design manual should not make websites? They should! And they should think they are good and make a cool portfolio of their design projects! Until web designers will stand to web design as butchers stand to brain surgery! Let's do whatever possible to have unskilled people reach shit results with OP tools till the end result is that web is worthless because websites don't sell as they are built by butchers who think are brain surgeons practicing on poor people thinking they are magicians of the keyboard. That's the road to go until money comes in! Amazing! Congratulations!
4:18 The one glaring oversight with your red graph is that you only have an X and a Y axis. You also need a Z axis for "more code bloat", and "less code bloat". At the end of the day most page builders that are "easy to use" and "feature rich" also inflate page size and therefore load time.
I think that's why you want to translate to Gutenberg in a page builder like this -future proof, and also fast - REACT.js etc. Block themes already are faster than their traditional counterparts cos of the JSON/React structure. I can also envision a time when WP isn't on PHP...shock horror....but the JS stuff point at a node.js future. We are not there yet, but mark my words. PHP will likely be one of the platforms in future...and eventually phased out as people move away to faster web servers.
Jamie, I am with you 100%. I am exactly the person you describe, I have no idea what Flexbox is. I teach and coach business English and that is what I want to focus on, getting my content onto a website and not banging my head against a brick wall trying to understand a simple thing like padding and margins. I have spent countless hours trying to get my head around these basics to the point it becomes frustrating. In the meantime, I will keep watching your videos. All the best Karl
Not crazy!!! Have thought this for a long time. I am a 30 year veteran full stack developer and still struggle to understand the basic philosophy of WordPress. It is to messy and clearly design/built by engineers not end users in mind.
I wouldn't say this is a novel idea. It's what Framer tries to accomplish. Just not on WP. The problem with tools like this is that they produce horrific HTML and CSS, throw accessibility out the window, and are usually a disaster on mobile. If you just drag things around and plop them places, the only CSS solution for that is absolute positioning. Aside from that being incredibly messy, there's also no scalability or maintainability or even basic rhythm. And even if these things are somehow magically accounted for in an alternate universe, the person building the site still needs to know copywriting, UI design, UX design, and on and on. It would be nice if people would just admit that building a website is not a task for a pure beginner. If you're just building a hobby site, fine. Do whatever you want. But if your website is for a legitimate business or client, you *must* actually do the work of *learning* and honing your craft. Clients should not be building their own websites - it's like being your own lawyer. It's a bad idea that produces bad results.
The reality is that there is a huge beginners market and WordPress is well placed for someone to address it properly. Check out how Canva dev team addresses things www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
I think your 100%right a drag & drop builder onto of gutenberg would definatly bring more people into wordpress. I remember when I 1st started using wordpress banging my head agent the desk trying to get images to display properly and switching between classic editor & html evry time I added an image
It would be good if you could switch to a simpler "designer view" with drag and drop. I feel a big issue with Gutenberg is the "group block" function, it should in theory make things easier but i find it just makes things even more fiddly, you can soon find yourself with group blocks within group blocks and it quickly gets confusing as to which block you have to click on to change simple things like the text colour etc. Group blocks also seem to mess with the formatting, it's like the group block is adding additional formatting on top of the blocks formatting. I feel if you could add text without it creating a new separate Paragraph block each time and then having to group block them together it would save a lot of time too, but apart from all that it's great.. 😁
Great idea Jammie! I am teaching WordPress in The Netherlands, mostly to complete beginners who just want a website for their small business etc. The block themes are a big improvement but changing the site design and the navigation and so on is still is a steep learning curve.
Jamie. Its a great idea if it is not a monthly subscription. Lifetime access is what people want either free or a one off payment. Plus someone who is willing to keep up on a monthly basis with the changes that are made in wordpress.
I've been a Canva Pro subscriber for years for all my graphics work... and smack talking WP over this exact issue for almost as long. If Canva websites had the robustness of WP, I'd ditch WP in a heartbeat. Creativity moves at the speed of improvisation... so, perhaps, WP will get it's head out of its butt and provide the means for creatives to do what they're meant to do, which is bang out their new groundbreaking idea asap as opposed to being forced to mess around with settings, consequently stepping on the toes of that beautiful instantaneous creative moment.
I must admit that there are aspects of FSE with Guttenberg that I find extremely challenging, particularly navigation/mobile navigation layout and styling (particularly with dropdown menus). Anything to simplify that area would be great.
Yes, I think Canva might be hard to aim for first thing (big pockets there, and hard to get to that simplicity level on first try), but some way of disrupting the Wix/Squarespace builder model would nothing but good, cos they are actually still quite fiddly and not as easy to use as Canva. Then work down to making it as simple as Canva....first adopters are likely to be tinkerers and designers anyway, so you'ld have a pathway down to making it more simple, even have a Easy / Moderate / Pro modes?
I love this idea. I come to my very limited level of web design experience from graphic design (mostly InDesign and Photoshop). I'd love for a website builder to be more like those products where I can put elements wherever I want and then easily adjust size/location/etc... At this point, I'd settle for simply being able to control how text wraps around an image (or images) in WordPress because the current process (at least as I understand how to do it) is maddening.
@BjarneOldrup I think as an OG web designer - been doing this since the mid 90's - even I can see that there's a problem with how WP does margins and flow. It's not so much 'hey I want my content exactly as I laid it out' vs print; but more when you're used to even basic typography, the lack of these in Wordpress and Gutenberg is maddening. LIke not even break points for relative margins? Or proper stacking without faffing with CSS? Even an integral Font Library has taken decades. It's getting better, but it's far from great. And page builders add bloat and slow things down.
I understand what you're saying. I teach designers at school. And although my students know the basics of HTML and CSS, they find it so difficult to get to grips with Wordpress. Their website designs always look great, but the implementation in Wordpress doesn't work. They would love to design a website the way you design print products.
Not understanding anything about web design is a little different than not understanding anything about design. I am by trade a designer, and it has taken me a very long time to learn and understand (what I can understand) of the development/PHP world that WordPress lives on ... and just when I was resigning myself to the onerous task of building a complete theme entirely from scratch, Gutenberg and Block Themes let me just jump right back into my happy "design" mode. I do think that the most basic WP beginner will still need to spend a fair bit of time understanding the principles of design - color, space, typography, form, line, shape - and then applying that to a web page. But all that being said, Canva is approachable, relatively easy to use, and can give you nice results fairly quickly. It will not make you a designer, overnight, tho.
I think you are right! Talented artsy creators would definitely start taking space because Gutenberg and Elementor has limitations. It would “kill” this job sector though. Or what do you think of this aspect?
Good point-my guess it would affect some of that market, but the easier something is then generally the market grows. So in the medium and long rung it might well end up growing the agency market when people look to upgrade their sites.
It's a great idea, but high functionality combined with ease of use probably comes with heavily reduced performance, and / or accessibility & usability issues.
Yup that's a big challenge for sure - check out how the team at Canva are approaching it technically www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
That would be fantastic! An absolutely great tool, not just for beginners. Many designers who don't want to deal with code and programming will also love a plug-in like this.
Yup thats the perfect question- getting that trade off right is the challenge and accepting that there has to be limitations. Whats left out is just as important as whats left in. Canva are absolute masters at this. I dont think it can be overstated how important this is for it to fly! Thanks for raising it 👍
1. Half-full Comment - Absolutely agree, but isn't that what Gutenberg should be anyway!? 2. Half empty Comment - Absolutely agree, but since no one has built it (including Automaticc), then presumably it's really hard to achieve, whereas bottom right quadrant is easier (ie Wix, Squarespace, etc) Where would you put Brizy? I think it is the easiest experience for absolute beginners.
You are not crazy, Jamie! It's an excellent idea but demanding to realize. However, I think you missed where to place Canva. Should it be in the bottom right corner? I guess they have some way to go for demanding users. It should be interesting to check the code structure of the output. I think Kadence has created something in that direction with the Text (Adv) block that can take all kinds of texts and adapt it to the user's screen size.
Yup good point - i wasn't intending to put Canva in the top right quadrant, but a tool with the simplicity of Canva and the extensibility of WordPress :)
Hi Jamie you are 100% correct you are not going mad, I just wish I studied php coding while at school, but at 75 now I can't absorb it now, but whoever does it will wind up mega rich.
I couldn't agree more! I teach beginners as well and WordPress at the moment is absolutely NOT beginners friendly. Something like WIX or Canva on top of WordPress would be amazing. (BTW I'm still a huge fan of your whiteboard 😅)
@@jamiewp for my experience, I work with over 200 companies, real companies, none of them have time or resources to invest in learning even easy things. They need to do their job, so I do mine for them. Even with Canva, a beginner will not create a poster or any other design element with same level of quality as a pro. Companies pay to make sure they have the best end result, companies that save money will not get the same level quality result. Also, even if a beginner design a website, designing it is just half of work. There's server management, DNS, SEO, email server, and many other technical issues. At the end, they lose a lot of time to develop something that will never compare to something a pro does, so they will lose business, they will never outrank a pro made website.
Yup im certainly not saying a Pro wont do this better, im saying there is a huge beginner market. I actually think a tool like this would help grow the market for Pro’s and plugin devs, and hosting companies. Its not a zero sum game imo.
All this assumes that this beginner DOES have a beautifully photographed product portfolio, a bunch of licensed decorative images and several renditions of their company logo. And if at all possible a colour design for all their business communications. Meanwhile I spent a WEEK trying to get a header to align on all desktop formats. Just text over image. WordPress today is a gargoyle. Anyone can take a sweet stock image and put a glassy effect over it when it doesn't matter if it is above or below the fold on a particular mobile browser, if the menu behaves erratically just because you added an extra page or google outright penalises you for having a typo in a link.
5:50 People should have to learn website design, at least the fundamentals. Psychology has a lot to do with design. Our mind sees good design subconsciously.
@@jamiewp Yes. Potentially. Each website builder program should start with a training course. Otherwise, the market will be saturated with badly designed websites.
as a designer, I say no to that. One person's bad design is another's masterpiece. Only bad design on the internet is technical issues, like it's cut off the page or SEO. But those things can be fixed automagically.
You're talking about experience, process, flow. The bias of developers is to place things within other things, so that things are contained by other things. Rather than creating their own dynamic space, they are organized in static blueprinted fashion, where everything has it's own specific place. Which is visually orderly and organized.
Everyone that has ever used WP has had this thought, if not only for beginners, but to speed up workflow and design. Not a new idea. Companies like to segment their offerings and differentiate themselves. Plus most of the providers mentioned think they are suitable for beginners. Like anything else, you want it done, do it yourself.
Yes Jamie, its a very good idea to become a canva in WP who beginners could build everything visually 🙂 When I can bought it? If you need Beta Tester here I am. Serious, let me know.
Call ME crazy, but I am hoping that WordPress is inching in the very direction you are dreaming about, no? But in order to keep all the current WP users, it has to move in baby steps.
Yup absolutely right , but inching. And i dont think Gutenberg will ever get to the ‘zero learning curve’ that the Canva website builder is already at.
A long time ago I was playing around with Microsoft Publisher and had the thought enter my mind "Why can't they make a website builder build pages like this? They came out with Front Page instead. Looks like Canva has made this happen. Easier is always better, and it should be fairly easy to work out the "bloat". I imagine AI is gonna help out with this a LOT in the future. But to answer your question YES YES YES. Make it EASIER is always better. Does Kadence AI do this? I haven't played with it yet.
Your premise is good, but so many questions come to mind when thinking about it more seriously... I have a similar idea for a WP plugin that I can't get out of my head for months now. I call it the "BuilderKiller" 😊 How will the beginners install and manage other aspects of WordPress if they need such a dumbed down version for Gutenberg (which is dumb but poorly organized) ? TL;DR Here are some of the questions I was wondering about. Doesn't Wix solve this beginner problem or at least a part of it ? Why would they use WordPress to build such simple pages in the first place and why not choose to go to use other builders ? Wouldn't it be easier to build a stand-alone simple builder or Figma to WP Block plugin and hack away some feature render it in Gutenbeg ? Are you sure beginners hang with a blank WordPress installation waiting for a "dumbed-down" version to match their skills ? Gutenberg still has a long way to go to solve it's own problems and. Would the time and resources investment worth for building such a tool on top of it ?
All fantastic questions - here's a few thoughts 1) Wix still has a lot of friction for beginners. I suggest you test out the Canva website builder to see what I mean in terms of 'zero learning curve" 2) WordPress brings many beginners into it, just because it's WordPress, but it feels like current wp builders are not focused on beginners 3) Figma - yup technically easier (check out relume for some cool stuff here) but that's not the market i.e beginners don't use figma 4) Great question re bland wordpress - check out the work mike m is planning with the Ollie Theme 5) Gutenberg issues - my view is that the number 1 issue with Gutenberg at the moment is polishing the UI, most of the technical architecture is in place. This is very evident with block themes - how do we make them easier to use than classic themes. But even when the UI is fully polished, beginners will still face friction and a learning curve. The opportunity in my view is to squash the curve.
@@jamiewp agreed about point 5. It feels like Gutenberg has settled, unlike the Gallery Wars we had of old. I don't think the structure will change. and likely be even more of a benefit when people start shifting to node.js type servers.
you are crazy. there is seo, website speed, different screen sizes, different color issues. I mean, people can't use photoshop without a learning curve. canva sites suck. Guttenberg sucks. But maybe with AI, and a forced standards environment, it's possible. But that would require lack of greed, an open mind, and a general sense of empathy. And you did say "business". So thats crazy. You are mad nutz. But I think it's why I like you. From the United States, much love.
There is much more to building websites than just drag some pixels around. There is strategy, content creation, UX, UI, SEO and so on. Comparing Website creation to a tool like Canva is misleading IMHO. Who needs websites that are worth nothing (because not ranking in search engines) and look like a picture drawn by a child with content that is of no interest to anyone? I don't get it. Everyone already can build Websites using beautiful prebuild themes and patterns. There is more need for educating people building better websites (SEO, UI, UX, Content) and understand the underlying principles. This would help us to professionalize our webdev ecosystem and create better websites for everyone. Dumbing down helps no one. Education is key.
Yes, yes to education! I recall years ago with design background and fairly tech literate, I wanted to pull my hair out trying to learn wordpress with the "courses" that were out there. I had better success learning HTML and CSS.
I remember such page builders with free moving objects existed many years ago, they worked with absolute positioning - and the code was horrible. How is Canvas'? I think at this time it's not possible to have really good results, how should the HTML/CSS engine translate this perfectly to code? Building a really good responsive layout for complex content with 3 breakpoints in Gutenberg is a challenge even for professionals :-) PS: Interesting Stats!
Great question - check this article out from the Canva development blog 'Using CSS grid to render complex webpages responsively.' www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Actually the idea isn't crazy at all and the concept is easy, you can place any element on a web page in any place you want using position in CSS and the core of your idea is around that property but in my opinion this will cause severe responsive design problems since not all screens are equal in size and the idea of flexbox and grid is to make it easier to keep the relative position and size of each element the same as possible on different screens, and I think with your idea every designer would have to design the websites many times to be responsive on different screens, that's my opinion after all and anyway great video 👍🏻
Thanks for watching 🙏 What doe you think about how Canva approach exactly what you outline - here's how they do it www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Yup sure has - if the generations that are coming up now are not using WordPress and are instead using other tools. Canva point the way if you check out their demographics.
@@jamiewp Who cares about demographics? Lol. Is it important that there’s an equal amount of men and women users? Is it important to have data on this at all? Can’t we leave gender, race, etc. out of it? I’m asking everybody, not only you.
Ah ok , im not making an equality point im making this point 1) if the upcoming generations or demographics arent using WordPress then its going to lose market share in the future
I'm not sure it is possible to build something with lots of functionality and be easy. Canva is easy but has limited functionality it's not a Photoshop equivalent. The more options you add the more complex the UI becomes, the more menus, drop downs etc... I don't think the existing page builders deliberately make things difficult to use. With that being said, maybe you can bridge this gap.
You can do something that is an 'Easy' level - limited functionality - but then have the option for Medium or Pro modes. Already, even a dumbed down 'Canva' style front end that pumps out WP Gutenberg Blocks would be really useful - because you can then just edit those in 'Pro' mode / normally. So you could have a mix of the two. The difficulty might be translating backwards - like it might be a one-way process to 'pro' edit an Easy site, because the Easy site won't have those features. But you could easily have a backup/rollback mode, for instance.
They used to have builders like this, but it was only possible by setting ridiculous amounts of absolute positioned items on the page. Everything becomes a "thing" absolute positioned on the "canvas". I think it's silly design, doesn't help create standard semantic markup, doesn't promote proper element hierarchy, doesn't lend itself easily to being mobile responsive (how are all those random placed elements going to adjust responsively automatically?) without thought to predefined grids and flex columns/rows and breakpoints? Even if the system is so easy to use that a person doesn't have to think about it, under the hood it will still have to use some kind of placement technique; flexbox, grid, floats, absolute positioning, etc. And beginner or not, there are decisions to make, like restraining the size of an image to fit a shape, versus letting the image be its own natural size (max-width, min-width?) Or decisions like stacking and margin overlays (negative margins, overlap), z-index, animating, parent->child layers, interactions, hover states, visibility, the list goes on. Canva and other drag-n-drop layout tools are perfectly fine when you have a fixed-width layout, like "I need a document 1200px wide and here is where stuff needs to fit and how big it is." But on the web we have to deal with responsive sizing, dynamic sizing, calcs, min and max widths, breakpoints, columns/rows, text sizing, and good source code. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying the user will have to be exposed to certain concepts of good web development at some level. They will need to make decisions about responsive adjustments, sizing, layouts, grids, content flow, and relating objects to each other. You can't escape it.
Great points - check out Canva's development blog to see how the do this with CSS Grid www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Great idea, the problem that beginners have, is also dealing with webhosting, Domains, emails, DNS, and Serverstuff in general, so whatever solution someone come up with, MUST be SaaS, like a sqarespace, wix, etcera. So Canva have a great User experience, you can publish a website with a click of a button, without dealing with technical stuff. This will never happen with wordpress. So canva will be the future wordpress or the new standard for small Business without SEO needs, or maybe just small project Websites. For that kind of Project, wordpress needs a rebranding or a kind of subbrand with a complete new aproach of UX for beginners, and left the classic wordpress for the pros or techies
Hey Paulo - thats such a great comment. Churn rate is hosting companies main pain points and i do think they could make the whole process more frictionless for beginners. Probably starting with simplifying their language in their pricing tables 😬
@@jamiewp Thank you ;-) well I think the Problem, are not the hosting companies. Beginners, do not understand, why they need a second company for that hosting thing. Canva is showing the right direction, the beginner doesn't have any contact to a hosting company during the process in canva. Maybe Canva is pushing all data to a hosting provider or to the AWS Cloud, the end user don't really know (he/she don't need to know and don't want to know about technical stuff and how it works) what is going on, because they are on the platform, where everything is happening including the fancy hosting thing, that happens in the background, and the user is only seeing the results direct and live online, without to leave or even logout. So in my opinion, canva is going to take over the hole market of beginner websites (next two Years - this is the time that wp needs to fix FSE System with version 7.0) and simple landing pages and eat up the cake that others have baked. Maybe wix with their agency model and squarespace is an option for more advanced users. So for all people out there who are building Websites fore clients or all CMS Systems: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," (Steve Jobs)
Oh Jamie! Brian’s First Law of Entrepreneurship - patent the idea before giving it away!!!! PS I bought my office building with the proceeds of a single UK patent! Well at least with a Provisional Patent. Giving away IPR is very British but it is optional 🌝 By the way your idea is brilliant 👍😎
AM should have stuck with the customiser. Blocks/gut are fantastic but FSE is a flop as per the market share. Even Astra and Generate are sticking with the Customiser. Yes Astra has SO but their Zip project is based on Classic theme.
Yup that is always an issue with these types of builders, but I'm doing some testing on the Canva builder for code quality and accessibility - i hope to have a video out on the results this week
Just because it easy does not mean you can design or understand the end user yourself. Similar to remodeling a house you can do it yourself it may look okay, or you hire a professional designer and a contracter to build it and it comes out way better. AI and beginner builders well not replace great design, build quality, and user experience research that takes a degree and or years of experience.
Great idea - put an entire industry of website builders out of business - that is how fortunes are made! Why should I have to pay someone to create my simple website? And with AI to craft the content and create beautiful images, yes, the time is now.
You mean like photography put artists like me out of business? LOL. That's not how it works...there will always be people wanting website built bespoke, and always some who want to do it themselves. Like fast fashion didn't kill tailoring, just made it more niche. And people don't want to pay a designer to put their Jumble Sale/local Scout group on the internet. I would argue if your main job is doing the basic one-pager level of local WI Jumble Sale, then you need to rethink your career. Also Canva, Wix and Squarespace are already eating your lunch, so...
It's a good idea but as anything is difficult to hold as a product/service in the long run, why? Ai ... Even though all the ai builder are not yet in the quality we deserve (I hate spectra install it by default in the new spectra versions). What you described is the ultimate version of WordPress and there for this ai builders. BUT if you get it right man... 🎉🎉❤... For what set of beginners? I will say you should refine what beginners would pay for this... You target audience... Shopify, not wix elementor or divi you want Shopify people here...
Maybe instead we should educate more beginners so they're not beginners anymore? I think that when things are too easy, it keeps them in an infantile mental state, and that sabotages their success. They expect everything to be easy, one click away, and when they come to a hurdle (which they will, eventually in a business), they will quit, because it's "too hard."
There's certainly an argument for that, and I've been training WordPress beginners for over 10 years. This video is not arguing against that, or that Pro Designers will always be better that Beginners. The video is just saying that there's a huge market opportunity in the space for an easy to use drag and drop page builder aimed specificially at beginnners and designers.
Oh as a web designer in a former life I know that making stuff hard to use just made my life more difficult. That bar to entry should be a LOT lower, it would have helped me and others. Whenever this has happened, it actually liberates creatives to create more, not less.
I just found this 👉 'Building a design product for non-designers, why would you do that?'.
Melanie Perkins the founder of Canva talking about some of the objections they faced from investors in the early days x.com/pootlepress/status/1752202251706233141?s=20
This sounds like a great idea. Here are a few thoughts.
First of all is the distinction between content and design. I always strive to make it easy for my clients to update their content themselves. To do this, I make quite a bit of use of Advanced Custom Fields to give them a backend that's easy to use for adding and changing content. On some sites I use Divi and show them how to edit the content on the page using the Divi front end editor.
So, my model is to give them the design and structure and put in the initial content, then teach them how to do updates. In reality, a lot of them still ask me to make content changes. They either don't want to be bothered, or they get too confused, which is understandable since they seldom do these activities, so they quickly forget what I've showed them. (Even when I make an instructional video, they often don't even bother to watch it.)
As far as giving them the kind of simple design capabilities you envision, on one hand, I think there are DIY clients who would love to have the capabilities, especially those who are trying to spend as little money as possible. On the other hand, I think a lot of the beginners will want someone else to do it for them.
So, when considering the market for this, I would say that not all beginners are really potential users. Some will have difficulty even though it will seem quite simple to us. For example, my wife, after years of using a computer for writing, still can't grasp cut and paste. And even though I've shown her multiple times how to bring up her Google calendar to find an entry that has the Zoom link for a meeting, about half the time, she asks me to come in and find it for her.
On the other hand, there are probably plenty of non-technical beginners who would probably use a product like this. I'm thinking of all the people I see who are musicians, artists, or have small businesses who use Wix or Squarespace to do a site by themselves. I often think, they could do so much better if they would have me do it for them, but that's how it is.
Another market beyond beginners is for web designers, and web developers who do small business sites, or sites for friends and family. For me, I am now looking at converting my Divi sites to the 2024 theme. (Thank you for all your FSE videos!) If I had a builder like what you are describing, I would be very likely to try it. With Divi I can put together really nice sites with lots of cool bells and whistles very quickly. If I could do that with a different page builder that was simple and had less bloat, even if there were fewer bells and whistles, I would be inclined to use it. (One of the reasons I still use Divi a lot is that, way back when, I bought a lifetime unlimited license on sale.)
All in all, I think it could be a good project. Off the top of my head, I have no clue how to do it, other than a guess that it will take a lot of JavaScript programming. But I haven't really thought it through. If you build this, I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
That’s a great analysis 💪👍
That's an amazing idea! Why unskilled people who have never even opened a graphic design manual should not make websites? They should! And they should think they are good and make a cool portfolio of their design projects! Until web designers will stand to web design as butchers stand to brain surgery! Let's do whatever possible to have unskilled people reach shit results with OP tools till the end result is that web is worthless because websites don't sell as they are built by butchers who think are brain surgeons practicing on poor people thinking they are magicians of the keyboard. That's the road to go until money comes in! Amazing! Congratulations!
eloquently put 🤣@@DogmaPromotion
4:18 The one glaring oversight with your red graph is that you only have an X and a Y axis.
You also need a Z axis for "more code bloat", and "less code bloat".
At the end of the day most page builders that are "easy to use" and "feature rich" also inflate page size and therefore load time.
I doing some accessibility and code quality on the Canva builder as a test - i hope to have a video out this week 👍
I think that's why you want to translate to Gutenberg in a page builder like this -future proof, and also fast - REACT.js etc. Block themes already are faster than their traditional counterparts cos of the JSON/React structure. I can also envision a time when WP isn't on PHP...shock horror....but the JS stuff point at a node.js future. We are not there yet, but mark my words. PHP will likely be one of the platforms in future...and eventually phased out as people move away to faster web servers.
Jamie, I am with you 100%. I am exactly the person you describe, I have no idea what Flexbox is. I teach and coach business English and that is what I want to focus on, getting my content onto a website and not banging my head against a brick wall trying to understand a simple thing like padding and margins. I have spent countless hours trying to get my head around these basics to the point it becomes frustrating. In the meantime, I will keep watching your videos. All the best Karl
thanks Karl - it's great to get your feedback - thank you for taking the time to write your comment.
Not crazy!!! Have thought this for a long time. I am a 30 year veteran full stack developer and still struggle to understand the basic philosophy of WordPress. It is to messy and clearly design/built by engineers not end users in mind.
Thanks Robert - i will add you to the yes pile 👍
You are absolutely not mad or crazy. This is a brilliant idea. Don’t stop thinking about it. Go on!!!!!
👍
I wouldn't say this is a novel idea. It's what Framer tries to accomplish. Just not on WP.
The problem with tools like this is that they produce horrific HTML and CSS, throw accessibility out the window, and are usually a disaster on mobile. If you just drag things around and plop them places, the only CSS solution for that is absolute positioning. Aside from that being incredibly messy, there's also no scalability or maintainability or even basic rhythm. And even if these things are somehow magically accounted for in an alternate universe, the person building the site still needs to know copywriting, UI design, UX design, and on and on.
It would be nice if people would just admit that building a website is not a task for a pure beginner. If you're just building a hobby site, fine. Do whatever you want. But if your website is for a legitimate business or client, you *must* actually do the work of *learning* and honing your craft. Clients should not be building their own websites - it's like being your own lawyer. It's a bad idea that produces bad results.
The reality is that there is a huge beginners market and WordPress is well placed for someone to address it properly. Check out how Canva dev team addresses things www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Yes, but to attract pure beginners to a web design platform, you have to lie to them. That's different from how I do business.@@jamiewp
Thanks for clearing that up 👍
I think your 100%right a drag & drop builder onto of gutenberg would definatly bring more people into wordpress. I remember when I 1st started using wordpress banging my head agent the desk trying to get images to display properly and switching between classic editor & html evry time I added an image
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Just do it Jaime! There are lots like me who would be happy, happy, happy!
thanks Joyce
It would be good if you could switch to a simpler "designer view" with drag and drop.
I feel a big issue with Gutenberg is the "group block" function, it should in theory make things easier but i find it just makes things even more fiddly, you can soon find yourself with group blocks within group blocks and it quickly gets confusing as to which block you have to click on to change simple things like the text colour etc.
Group blocks also seem to mess with the formatting, it's like the group block is adding additional formatting on top of the blocks formatting.
I feel if you could add text without it creating a new separate Paragraph block each time and then having to group block them together it would save a lot of time too, but apart from all that it's great.. 😁
Yes please! A drag and drop builder that uses actual Wordpress elements sounds amazing.
👍
Great idea Jammie! I am teaching WordPress in The Netherlands, mostly to complete beginners who just want a website for their small business etc.
The block themes are a big improvement but changing the site design and the navigation and so on is still is a steep learning curve.
Thanks Gerlof - its great to get your feedback - that’s exactly my experience too 👍
Jamie. Its a great idea if it is not a monthly subscription. Lifetime access is what people want either free or a one off payment. Plus someone who is willing to keep up on a monthly basis with the changes that are made in wordpress.
Noted 👍
I've been a Canva Pro subscriber for years for all my graphics work... and smack talking WP over this exact issue for almost as long. If Canva websites had the robustness of WP, I'd ditch WP in a heartbeat. Creativity moves at the speed of improvisation... so, perhaps, WP will get it's head out of its butt and provide the means for creatives to do what they're meant to do, which is bang out their new groundbreaking idea asap as opposed to being forced to mess around with settings, consequently stepping on the toes of that beautiful instantaneous creative moment.
Thanks for the perspective Thomas
I must admit that there are aspects of FSE with Guttenberg that I find extremely challenging, particularly navigation/mobile navigation layout and styling (particularly with dropdown menus). Anything to simplify that area would be great.
Yup it would be great to simplify FSE for beginners
Something half way between Squarespace and Kadence would work really well in the page builder ecosystem
👍
Exactly it could be between Squarespace and Kadence Blocks
Yes, I think Canva might be hard to aim for first thing (big pockets there, and hard to get to that simplicity level on first try), but some way of disrupting the Wix/Squarespace builder model would nothing but good, cos they are actually still quite fiddly and not as easy to use as Canva. Then work down to making it as simple as Canva....first adopters are likely to be tinkerers and designers anyway, so you'ld have a pathway down to making it more simple, even have a Easy / Moderate / Pro modes?
You're spot on Jamie. Life could also be much easier and making sites faster to design for the us experienced bunch too.
Yup absolutely agree- Canva show the way on how experienced designers also love simple tools
@@jamiewp I use CANVA a lot, but haven't tried the web design tool (yet)
Its worth 20 mins of your time
I love this idea. I come to my very limited level of web design experience from graphic design (mostly InDesign and Photoshop). I'd love for a website builder to be more like those products where I can put elements wherever I want and then easily adjust size/location/etc... At this point, I'd settle for simply being able to control how text wraps around an image (or images) in WordPress because the current process (at least as I understand how to do it) is maddening.
Thanks Philip - thats a great point about indesign and photoshop
@BjarneOldrup I think as an OG web designer - been doing this since the mid 90's - even I can see that there's a problem with how WP does margins and flow. It's not so much 'hey I want my content exactly as I laid it out' vs print; but more when you're used to even basic typography, the lack of these in Wordpress and Gutenberg is maddening. LIke not even break points for relative margins? Or proper stacking without faffing with CSS? Even an integral Font Library has taken decades.
It's getting better, but it's far from great. And page builders add bloat and slow things down.
I understand what you're saying. I teach designers at school. And although my students know the basics of HTML and CSS, they find it so difficult to get to grips with Wordpress. Their website designs always look great, but the implementation in Wordpress doesn't work. They would love to design a website the way you design print products.
Thats Gunner - thats really interesting
Not understanding anything about web design is a little different than not understanding anything about design. I am by trade a designer, and it has taken me a very long time to learn and understand (what I can understand) of the development/PHP world that WordPress lives on ... and just when I was resigning myself to the onerous task of building a complete theme entirely from scratch, Gutenberg and Block Themes let me just jump right back into my happy "design" mode.
I do think that the most basic WP beginner will still need to spend a fair bit of time understanding the principles of design - color, space, typography, form, line, shape - and then applying that to a web page. But all that being said, Canva is approachable, relatively easy to use, and can give you nice results fairly quickly. It will not make you a designer, overnight, tho.
Fantastic points re design 👍
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out to the midday sun.
And oftentimes come up with startling discoveries.
Good thinking.
💪
Isn't the market already flooded with unprofessional, inaccessible websites? As a business model, it is good, but what will it bring to the world?
If its done well it could level up web design
Many millions of us newbies are pleading for this
👍
I think you are right! Talented artsy creators would definitely start taking space because Gutenberg and Elementor has limitations. It would “kill” this job sector though. Or what do you think of this aspect?
Good point-my guess it would affect some of that market, but the easier something is then generally the market grows. So in the medium and long rung it might well end up growing the agency market when people look to upgrade their sites.
It's a great idea, but high functionality combined with ease of use probably comes with heavily reduced performance, and / or accessibility & usability issues.
Yup that's a big challenge for sure - check out how the team at Canva are approaching it technically www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
@@jamiewp That's a great read! Thanks, Jamie!
👍
love the canva stats…. where's the 'stats' source from.. curious as I'd like to put a case forward to my managers.. and need to reference the numbers
Some from here www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/canva-statistics
That would be fantastic! An absolutely great tool, not just for beginners. Many designers who don't want to deal with code and programming will also love a plug-in like this.
Hi Jo, that's a great point about designers 👍
Already is a plugin like that I think
?@@Randy12346
This is a ground breaking idea. A billion dollar idea.
👍
sounds amazing, if there is trade of between easy-to-use and lots-of-functionallity what would you choose?
Yup thats the perfect question- getting that trade off right is the challenge and accepting that there has to be limitations. Whats left out is just as important as whats left in. Canva are absolute masters at this. I dont think it can be overstated how important this is for it to fly! Thanks for raising it 👍
You're smart and thinking out of the box
Cheers Marko 👍
Have you tried Hreenshift theme and block builder?
Do you mean Greenshift? If so , i've only had a quick look so far
using canva website: once designed can the website be converted to kadencewp theme?
Elementor is good enough ig??
1. Half-full Comment - Absolutely agree, but isn't that what Gutenberg should be anyway!?
2. Half empty Comment - Absolutely agree, but since no one has built it (including Automaticc), then presumably it's really hard to achieve, whereas bottom right quadrant is easier (ie Wix, Squarespace, etc)
Where would you put Brizy? I think it is the easiest experience for absolute beginners.
You are not crazy, Jamie! It's an excellent idea but demanding to realize. However, I think you missed where to place Canva. Should it be in the bottom right corner? I guess they have some way to go for demanding users. It should be interesting to check the code structure of the output. I think Kadence has created something in that direction with the Text (Adv) block that can take all kinds of texts and adapt it to the user's screen size.
Yup good point - i wasn't intending to put Canva in the top right quadrant, but a tool with the simplicity of Canva and the extensibility of WordPress :)
Hi Jamie you are 100% correct you are not going mad, I just wish I studied php coding while at school, but at 75 now I can't absorb it now, but whoever does it will wind up mega rich.
Tks John
You are not alone my friend! This idea has been popping in my head every now and then (then I get busy with something else)
😀
Team Stackable, please save us!!!
I couldn't agree more! I teach beginners as well and WordPress at the moment is absolutely NOT beginners friendly. Something like WIX or Canva on top of WordPress would be amazing. (BTW I'm still a huge fan of your whiteboard 😅)
Thanks Jette - the whiteboard has quite a few fans now 😃
@@jamiewp as a former teacher who still likes analog communication, I would 100% do the same if I had a channel. Chalk Talks for the win!
👍
2:20 Isn’t Canva for design, not development?
Canva has a website builder
@@jamiewp Oh boy. I would love to see the output HTML code from that. Lol
That video is coming this week (and i have an accessibility expert lined up 👍)
I love all your ideas and products and I love you Jdogg 😍
Thank you 🙏
Truly good work!
Cheers
the point is even for an absolute beginner there's a learning curve.. even most of the beginners get overwhelmed by that stage.
You should check out the Canva website builder 👍
About time! Go, Jamie, go! If you could add an AI assistant to the mix, you would probably be billed as a digital messiah! 👍👍👍
Happy with that Eddy :)
No, sir, you're not crazy at all, and that's how Gutenberg should work, in my opinion.
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You're not crazy....it is a massive opportunity.
👍
Next idea: Build your own house for begginers
Canva have shown the way with how they have disrupted the Design market 👍
@@jamiewp for my experience, I work with over 200 companies, real companies, none of them have time or resources to invest in learning even easy things. They need to do their job, so I do mine for them. Even with Canva, a beginner will not create a poster or any other design element with same level of quality as a pro. Companies pay to make sure they have the best end result, companies that save money will not get the same level quality result. Also, even if a beginner design a website, designing it is just half of work. There's server management, DNS, SEO, email server, and many other technical issues. At the end, they lose a lot of time to develop something that will never compare to something a pro does, so they will lose business, they will never outrank a pro made website.
Yup im certainly not saying a Pro wont do this better, im saying there is a huge beginner market. I actually think a tool like this would help grow the market for Pro’s and plugin devs, and hosting companies. Its not a zero sum game imo.
True mate
I think you're right on the money💰
All this assumes that this beginner DOES have a beautifully photographed product portfolio, a bunch of licensed decorative images and several renditions of their company logo. And if at all possible a colour design for all their business communications.
Meanwhile I spent a WEEK trying to get a header to align on all desktop formats. Just text over image.
WordPress today is a gargoyle. Anyone can take a sweet stock image and put a glassy effect over it when it doesn't matter if it is above or below the fold on a particular mobile browser, if the menu behaves erratically just because you added an extra page or google outright penalises you for having a typo in a link.
5:50 People should have to learn website design, at least the fundamentals. Psychology has a lot to do with design. Our mind sees good design subconsciously.
Do you mean we should force then to ?
@@jamiewp Yes. Potentially. Each website builder program should start with a training course. Otherwise, the market will be saturated with badly designed websites.
Interesting idea - it would be great if the tool had this built into eg snap to grid with golden ratio etc 🤔
@@jamiewp this would be essential!
as a designer, I say no to that. One person's bad design is another's masterpiece. Only bad design on the internet is technical issues, like it's cut off the page or SEO. But those things can be fixed automagically.
You're talking about experience, process, flow. The bias of developers is to place things within other things, so that things are contained by other things. Rather than creating their own dynamic space, they are organized in static blueprinted fashion, where everything has it's own specific place. Which is visually orderly and organized.
LOVE this idea!!
Thank you!!
Everyone that has ever used WP has had this thought, if not only for beginners, but to speed up workflow and design. Not a new idea. Companies like to segment their offerings and differentiate themselves. Plus most of the providers mentioned think they are suitable for beginners.
Like anything else, you want it done, do it yourself.
Banger of an idea!
Cheers
AB-SO-BLOOMIN-LUTELY!!!
👍
Everyone hangs out in the high functionality and ease of use area!
Yup
Nothing worth doing is easy.
Very true
1:14 Wix has been doing this for years.
Wix is still too complex - this needs to be like Canva i.e zero learning curve
Yes Jamie, its a very good idea to become a canva in WP who beginners could build everything visually 🙂 When I can bought it? If you need Beta Tester here I am. Serious, let me know.
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Jamie you told about this drag and drop Guttenberg page builder about a year ago and I am waiting for it to get launched.
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@@jamiewp👍🏼👍🏼💩
Call ME crazy, but I am hoping that WordPress is inching in the very direction you are dreaming about, no? But in order to keep all the current WP users, it has to move in baby steps.
Yup absolutely right , but inching. And i dont think Gutenberg will ever get to the ‘zero learning curve’ that the Canva website builder is already at.
To my great chagrin in life, dreaming is a lot easier than building…
5:43 It's called Dreamweaver 😂
😬
A long time ago I was playing around with Microsoft Publisher and had the thought enter my mind "Why can't they make a website builder build pages like this? They came out with Front Page instead. Looks like Canva has made this happen. Easier is always better, and it should be fairly easy to work out the "bloat". I imagine AI is gonna help out with this a LOT in the future. But to answer your question YES YES YES. Make it EASIER is always better. Does Kadence AI do this? I haven't played with it yet.
Thank you for the comment Brent and thank you for your perspective 👍
Your premise is good, but so many questions come to mind when thinking about it more seriously...
I have a similar idea for a WP plugin that I can't get out of my head for months now. I call it the "BuilderKiller" 😊
How will the beginners install and manage other aspects of WordPress if they need such a dumbed down version for Gutenberg (which is dumb but poorly organized) ?
TL;DR
Here are some of the questions I was wondering about.
Doesn't Wix solve this beginner problem or at least a part of it ?
Why would they use WordPress to build such simple pages in the first place and why not choose to go to use other builders ?
Wouldn't it be easier to build a stand-alone simple builder or Figma to WP Block plugin and hack away some feature render it in Gutenbeg ?
Are you sure beginners hang with a blank WordPress installation waiting for a "dumbed-down" version to match their skills ?
Gutenberg still has a long way to go to solve it's own problems and.
Would the time and resources investment worth for building such a tool on top of it ?
All fantastic questions - here's a few thoughts
1) Wix still has a lot of friction for beginners. I suggest you test out the Canva website builder to see what I mean in terms of 'zero learning curve"
2) WordPress brings many beginners into it, just because it's WordPress, but it feels like current wp builders are not focused on beginners
3) Figma - yup technically easier (check out relume for some cool stuff here) but that's not the market i.e beginners don't use figma
4) Great question re bland wordpress - check out the work mike m is planning with the Ollie Theme
5) Gutenberg issues - my view is that the number 1 issue with Gutenberg at the moment is polishing the UI, most of the technical architecture is in place. This is very evident with block themes - how do we make them easier to use than classic themes. But even when the UI is fully polished, beginners will still face friction and a learning curve. The opportunity in my view is to squash the curve.
@@jamiewp agreed about point 5. It feels like Gutenberg has settled, unlike the Gallery Wars we had of old. I don't think the structure will change. and likely be even more of a benefit when people start shifting to node.js type servers.
It's a great idea as long as it also works fine with SEO.
Good point - the HTML output will need to be clean, semantic and good for SEO
This is the exact value-prop of Wix and Squarespace
Yup but I think Canva is a better match
5:17 Move Hindenberg, I mean, Gutenberg to the left. Far left. 😅
?
@@jamiewp It's a Kevin Geary joke.
Right
Where do all those elements come from ? Are these beginners photoshop users ? Where do they get their graphics IQ ?
Canva shows the market is there
you are crazy. there is seo, website speed, different screen sizes, different color issues. I mean, people can't use photoshop without a learning curve. canva sites suck. Guttenberg sucks. But maybe with AI, and a forced standards environment, it's possible. But that would require lack of greed, an open mind, and a general sense of empathy. And you did say "business". So thats crazy. You are mad nutz. But I think it's why I like you. From the United States, much love.
😬
Great idea - I’m a new user!
Awesome! Thank you!
There is much more to building websites than just drag some pixels around. There is strategy, content creation, UX, UI, SEO and so on. Comparing Website creation to a tool like Canva is misleading IMHO. Who needs websites that are worth nothing (because not ranking in search engines) and look like a picture drawn by a child with content that is of no interest to anyone? I don't get it. Everyone already can build Websites using beautiful prebuild themes and patterns. There is more need for educating people building better websites (SEO, UI, UX, Content) and understand the underlying principles. This would help us to professionalize our webdev ecosystem and create better websites for everyone. Dumbing down helps no one. Education is key.
Thanks for your perspective 👍
Yes, yes to education! I recall years ago with design background and fairly tech literate, I wanted to pull my hair out trying to learn wordpress with the "courses" that were out there. I had better success learning HTML and CSS.
Very good idea. But not sure how easy is to do it. For sure will have a big success.
thanks for watching
You are completely correct 🎉
👍
I remember such page builders with free moving objects existed many years ago, they worked with absolute positioning - and the code was horrible. How is Canvas'? I think at this time it's not possible to have really good results, how should the HTML/CSS engine translate this perfectly to code?
Building a really good responsive layout for complex content with 3 breakpoints in Gutenberg is a challenge even for professionals :-)
PS: Interesting Stats!
Great question - check this article out from the Canva development blog 'Using CSS grid to render complex webpages responsively.' www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Nice work buddy
thanks
Actually the idea isn't crazy at all and the concept is easy, you can place any element on a web page in any place you want using position in CSS and the core of your idea is around that property but in my opinion this will cause severe responsive design problems since not all screens are equal in size and the idea of flexbox and grid is to make it easier to keep the relative position and size of each element the same as possible on different screens, and I think with your idea every designer would have to design the websites many times to be responsive on different screens, that's my opinion after all and anyway great video 👍🏻
Thanks for watching 🙏 What doe you think about how Canva approach exactly what you outline - here's how they do it www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
@@jamiewp That was amazing and interesting to read and know about, the idea of working around grid to make any element positioned absolute is great
@@ahmedmansour4614 i thought you would like it 👍
@@jamiewp It truly did, thank you so much
2:48 “WordPress has a demographic problem”?? 🤔🙄🤦🏻
Yup sure has - if the generations that are coming up now are not using WordPress and are instead using other tools. Canva point the way if you check out their demographics.
@@jamiewp Who cares about demographics? Lol. Is it important that there’s an equal amount of men and women users? Is it important to have data on this at all? Can’t we leave gender, race, etc. out of it? I’m asking everybody, not only you.
Ah ok , im not making an equality point im making this point
1) if the upcoming generations or demographics arent using WordPress then its going to lose market share in the future
I'm not sure it is possible to build something with lots of functionality and be easy. Canva is easy but has limited functionality it's not a Photoshop equivalent. The more options you add the more complex the UI becomes, the more menus, drop downs etc... I don't think the existing page builders deliberately make things difficult to use.
With that being said, maybe you can bridge this gap.
👍
You can do something that is an 'Easy' level - limited functionality - but then have the option for Medium or Pro modes. Already, even a dumbed down 'Canva' style front end that pumps out WP Gutenberg Blocks would be really useful - because you can then just edit those in 'Pro' mode / normally. So you could have a mix of the two. The difficulty might be translating backwards - like it might be a one-way process to 'pro' edit an Easy site, because the Easy site won't have those features.
But you could easily have a backup/rollback mode, for instance.
A great idea indeed.
Thanks Mark
They used to have builders like this, but it was only possible by setting ridiculous amounts of absolute positioned items on the page. Everything becomes a "thing" absolute positioned on the "canvas". I think it's silly design, doesn't help create standard semantic markup, doesn't promote proper element hierarchy, doesn't lend itself easily to being mobile responsive (how are all those random placed elements going to adjust responsively automatically?) without thought to predefined grids and flex columns/rows and breakpoints?
Even if the system is so easy to use that a person doesn't have to think about it, under the hood it will still have to use some kind of placement technique; flexbox, grid, floats, absolute positioning, etc. And beginner or not, there are decisions to make, like restraining the size of an image to fit a shape, versus letting the image be its own natural size (max-width, min-width?) Or decisions like stacking and margin overlays (negative margins, overlap), z-index, animating, parent->child layers, interactions, hover states, visibility, the list goes on.
Canva and other drag-n-drop layout tools are perfectly fine when you have a fixed-width layout, like "I need a document 1200px wide and here is where stuff needs to fit and how big it is." But on the web we have to deal with responsive sizing, dynamic sizing, calcs, min and max widths, breakpoints, columns/rows, text sizing, and good source code.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying the user will have to be exposed to certain concepts of good web development at some level. They will need to make decisions about responsive adjustments, sizing, layouts, grids, content flow, and relating objects to each other. You can't escape it.
Great points - check out Canva's development blog to see how the do this with CSS Grid www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Great idea, the problem that beginners have, is also dealing with webhosting, Domains, emails, DNS, and Serverstuff in general, so whatever solution someone come up with, MUST be SaaS, like a sqarespace, wix, etcera. So Canva have a great User experience, you can publish a website with a click of a button, without dealing with technical stuff. This will never happen with wordpress. So canva will be the future wordpress or the new standard for small Business without SEO needs, or maybe just small project Websites.
For that kind of Project, wordpress needs a rebranding or a kind of subbrand with a complete new aproach of UX for beginners, and left the classic wordpress for the pros or techies
Hey Paulo - thats such a great comment. Churn rate is hosting companies main pain points and i do think they could make the whole process more frictionless for beginners. Probably starting with simplifying their language in their pricing tables 😬
@@jamiewp Thank you ;-) well I think the Problem, are not the hosting companies. Beginners, do not understand, why they need a second company for that hosting thing. Canva is showing the right direction, the beginner doesn't have any contact to a hosting company during the process in canva. Maybe Canva is pushing all data to a hosting provider or to the AWS Cloud, the end user don't really know (he/she don't need to know and don't want to know about technical stuff and how it works) what is going on, because they are on the platform, where everything is happening including the fancy hosting thing, that happens in the background, and the user is only seeing the results direct and live online, without to leave or even logout.
So in my opinion, canva is going to take over the hole market of beginner websites (next two Years - this is the time that wp needs to fix FSE System with version 7.0) and simple landing pages and eat up the cake that others have baked. Maybe wix with their agency model and squarespace is an option for more advanced users.
So for all people out there who are building Websites fore clients or all CMS Systems:
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," (Steve Jobs)
Oh Jamie! Brian’s First Law of Entrepreneurship - patent the idea before giving it away!!!!
PS I bought my office building with the proceeds of a single UK patent!
Well at least with a Provisional Patent. Giving away IPR is very British but it is optional 🌝
By the way your idea is brilliant 👍😎
Cheers Brian
AM should have stuck with the customiser. Blocks/gut are fantastic but FSE is a flop as per the market share. Even Astra and Generate are sticking with the Customiser. Yes Astra has SO but their Zip project is based on Classic theme.
AM ?
@@jamiewp automatic
So how much of it have you built? -- I'll be glad to try the beta ( however beta must be pronounced correctly. You know the Americian way:))
It’s called English for a reason Mike 😉 And don’t even get me started how you guys say Herbs 😬
LOL ! have a great evening !! -
Oh and I haven’t built anything yet (although ive had quite a few contacts since publishing this video)
Im sure you have it's a tremendous idea in the sweet spot of what's needed.@@jamiewp
👍
You left price off the graph.
Yup
Didn’t you just describe Wix :))
Not quite - this needs to be easier to use than Wix, like Canva
One word… “Responsive”. How?
Here's how to dev team at Canva approached it www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
Wise or foolish, where is the line
😬
look at some of the new AI website builders.
the problem is clean code imho
Yup that is always an issue with these types of builders, but I'm doing some testing on the Canva builder for code quality and accessibility - i hope to have a video out on the results this week
Just because it easy does not mean you can design or understand the end user yourself. Similar to remodeling a house you can do it yourself it may look okay, or you hire a professional designer and a contracter to build it and it comes out way better. AI and beginner builders well not replace great design, build quality, and user experience research that takes a degree and or years of experience.
100% agree and tool like this will never replace a pro designer but it will help beginners who maybe don’t have the budget fir one to get started 👍
4:42 Seriously? Bricks is easy if you know the fundamentals of HTML (website development).
Im talking about complete beginners picking up a tool for the first time - im pretty clear on that hopefully 👍
@@jamiewp Yep
No, you are not crazy. It is a good idea but... It would have to be built for a particular audience.
Yup exactly
Yeah, beginners
Great idea - put an entire industry of website builders out of business - that is how fortunes are made! Why should I have to pay someone to create my simple website? And with AI to craft the content and create beautiful images, yes, the time is now.
You mean like photography put artists like me out of business? LOL.
That's not how it works...there will always be people wanting website built bespoke, and always some who want to do it themselves. Like fast fashion didn't kill tailoring, just made it more niche.
And people don't want to pay a designer to put their Jumble Sale/local Scout group on the internet. I would argue if your main job is doing the basic one-pager level of local WI Jumble Sale, then you need to rethink your career. Also Canva, Wix and Squarespace are already eating your lunch, so...
It's a good idea but as anything is difficult to hold as a product/service in the long run, why? Ai ... Even though all the ai builder are not yet in the quality we deserve (I hate spectra install it by default in the new spectra versions). What you described is the ultimate version of WordPress and there for this ai builders. BUT if you get it right man... 🎉🎉❤... For what set of beginners? I will say you should refine what beginners would pay for this... You target audience... Shopify, not wix elementor or divi you want Shopify people here...
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When are they going to have WordPress builder AI? AI BUILD it FOR YOU YOU JUST TELL what you want..
Some companies are doing this - video coming soon
NicePage
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Posted before I heard your criteria about using Gutenberg blocks.@@jamiewp
Maybe instead we should educate more beginners so they're not beginners anymore? I think that when things are too easy, it keeps them in an infantile mental state, and that sabotages their success. They expect everything to be easy, one click away, and when they come to a hurdle (which they will, eventually in a business), they will quit, because it's "too hard."
There's certainly an argument for that, and I've been training WordPress beginners for over 10 years. This video is not arguing against that, or that Pro Designers will always be better that Beginners. The video is just saying that there's a huge market opportunity in the space for an easy to use drag and drop page builder aimed specificially at beginnners and designers.
Hard to use is good. Otherwise we (ppl who has webbuilding as profession and source of income) can not make money.
I dont think its a zero sum game - it could grow the overall market
Oh as a web designer in a former life I know that making stuff hard to use just made my life more difficult. That bar to entry should be a LOT lower, it would have helped me and others. Whenever this has happened, it actually liberates creatives to create more, not less.
Bye bye responsive
This is worth a read - it explains how Canva use CSS grid www.canva.dev/blog/engineering/css-absolutely-positioning-things-relatively/
@@jamiewp It's cool, I wonder how this would work with a complex and real life website.
Yup that's the real challenge - imo you'd need to start with very limited options (like Canva) @@EliasGomezPro