Comparing Simple Theme Builder Options With CMS Platforms

TL:DR;

For those of you out there who are TL:DR; folks, I will start off by telling you what I prefer, and that is the CMS (open source) platforms route. If you’re curious to know about my argument, please read ahead! 🙂 But please know that this is strictly my opinion and based on a decade of experience experimenting with various platforms from both big and small companies. I will also add later a reason why a company shouldn’t use either of them when scaling up. What other options are available out there that are beneficial for larger scale operations and my thoughts on where the web development space is moving towards.

HISTORY

Let’s start by comparing the biggest division in website development. The advent of this division started as early back as I can remember was around 2008 which was my first experience with anything related to software as a service (SAAS). At the time, open source platforms such as WordPress and Drupal dominated the field of website development. This was really the only quick means to organize your content, images, administration controls, etc. Before that, developers simply FTP to a server with simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The one role to manage anything on the web was a web master. Classic title! Course, over the next two years (2010-ish) I started noticing ads all over the subway and buses for something called Squarespace. Huge marketing budget clearly and their ads focused on the ease of making a website. This made me nervous, but at the same time, I knew that open source CMS platforms were still very powerful tools that garnished a huge support from outside developers.

Squarespace is a closed and proprietary system. You can still use regular old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a site, but the you’re tied to their user interface and hosting support. There was a limit on how you gain access to your site and there was no way to share your website with another developer when on a freelance basis or within a company. I later worked at a small design firm that utilized Squarespace and Concrete5. Two early entries to this SAAS theme builder platform. Later on I got the chance to work with Wix and eventually Webflow.

PAYING FOR OPTIONS

After using Squarespace in the past, I knew it wasn’t an option for web development. It had payment tier, how many hosted sites you can setup, tedious and clunky interfaces just to make simple code snippet changes challenging to manage. There weren’t any development, staging, or production environments setup for you to make sure you aren’t stepping on anyones toes while building the site. Pasting in CSS code and writing HTML were located in different windows which often meant that when pushing code, you may inadvertently push out others drafted changes instantaneously! Last major thing is that this is all cloud based. You don’t get the option to test and build the site offline on your machine. Say if you loose power or the cloud is down, there is no way to continue your work.

In 2022, I worked at a remote company that utilized Webflow as their primary website publishing platform. There were talks within the company to move over to a more reliable platform that is scalable and open source. The company only paid for the lowest tier plan. The caveat to development that I could best remember was the global CSS space. You could off load your styles to this interface, but it was far away from the theme builder interface. Kept in an obscured location within the administration panel. What’s worst, get this, 20,000 line CSS limit, for your whole site within the global styling section. Granted, you could add separate CSS styles per content page, but this made it impossible if you wanted to have things more organized. There was also a limit with the JavaScript file. Which was also segmented into two locations.

The user experience with Webflow was also difficult when it came to publishing pages. You’re either a “designer,” or “editor.” When one person is editing the site, it prevents others from editing, even if you are on another page. If they publish anything, and if your page is still in the works and NOT set to “draft mode,” your changes gets dragged along with it. This was a major issue when it came to separation of tasks with project managers and marketing folks. This also meant no development, staging, or production environment options.

OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY

As I mentioned earlier, the theme builder platforms are not entirely open source. You can not download a static version of the site if you hosted your code on GitHub and share it with another developer on your team and allow them to work on it locally on their machine. In Webflow, you can download a static copy, but there is no way to obtain the database. That is strictly locked away.

The power of open source is due to the flexibility of development. You can tinker with everything from front-end styling and user interface functionalities, down to the way your site communicates with your server (PHP). And as always, a lot of people download the either WordPress or Drupal for free and people can hack away and make improvements to the platform and request improvements to the organizations core platform code.

Third party plugins and modules can be added to enhance the sites capabilities. Some of these options are free, but there are also premium options that you have to only pay once. This is far beyond what comes out of the box initially. WordPress comes with only a couple while Drupal starts you off with a plethora of important modules that spans in 18 options the last I checked. Not only are you supporting a third party company, but also sharing it with the outside community to collaborate and develop new changes in order to enhance the CMS experience as a whole.

You can not do this with services like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow. They are closed and you have to rely on their internal teams to make improvements gradually. If there was a feature you needed that wasn’t available, say a HIPAA compliant form, you would have to use something like Typeform in order to achieve your contact form goals. You can embedded the form onto your site, but it’s not part of the SAAS platforms official ecosystem. With WordPress or Drupal, there are third party forms that you can download as en extension to your site and make sign up form a single seamless experience.

HOSTING

Where and how your site lives on the web is critical. While the classic option is to sign up with a hosting provider who has actual servers such as Bluehost, Media Temple, SiteGround, HostGator, GoDaddy, etc. they don’t always provide the platform support that you need. If you have a WordPress or Drupal site, often times you need to install and manage that platform by yourself. This would include plugins, databases, asset management. These management tasks usually falls to the developer to maintain.

Fast forward to around 2015, we see the evolution of SAAS such as WPEngine, Pantheon.io, Kinsta. They are primarily CMS focused and can provide a plugin or module to support your CMS with extra security and backup options. As a WordPress user myself, I generally sway towards WPEngine with the support benefits such as database backup options. In around the same year, I noticed new players such as Wix and Webflow come into the picture. More website builder platforms, that provide hosting. But as I had mentioned earlier, it is closed source. You can pull a local copy down to work on it and still have dynamic components to work with.

It is now 2023 and I am starting to see another evolutionary change with SAAS website building platforms. You have popular theme builders such as Elementor, which once was a plugin for WordPress, is now providing their own web hosting solution. Another alternative to Elementor is Brizy which provides a WordPress plugin theme builder solution, but they also offer a cloud based platform. This basically enters the realm of Wix and Webflow.

CONSLUSION

There are several factors to consider when choosing a website development platform. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. A company needs to look at all the angles before making a solid solution.

The first thing to consider depends on the size of the business. This would dictate the type of platform that best suit the company’s needs. How many dedicate people does the company have for website development and maintenance. Next thing to consider is budget. If there isn’t enough money that means there isn’t enough people to be paid to do the work of managing the site. Eventually, paying a small subscription fee for a SAAS platform to host and manage the health of the company site is a quicker solution. Last major thing is time. How much time is a company willing to update their site. Paying an exuberant amount of money for a small mom and pop bakery shop that just needs a gallery and a contact form hardly needs such overhead. However, if the company expands, and say the mom and pop shop now hosts a ecommerce section selling baking goods, cookware, and gift items, this would require a heavier payment tier with the theme builders.

Theme builders can only do so much. The company would need to scale up to a larger platform like WordPress with plugin options such as Shopify or Magento to manage e-business solutions. The latter tier for large scale operations wouldn’t even be CMS platforms. I’ve experienced in the past that WordPress and Drupal platforms moves to strictly marketing department purposes while the company either builds their site from the ground up using PHP or some sort of front-end framework such as React, Angular, or Vue to facilitate for API consumable changes. Course this is getting into the realm of web applications which is beyond a simple website.

In the end, as a experienced web developer, I’ll stick with the flexibility by joining a larger ecosystems, which is the open source community. Granted there are avenues that will require a bit more time and money, but it is money well spent in supporting technology that benefits everyone.

This was initially published on my site at jameslau.com (https://jameslau.com/comparing-simple-theme-builder-options-with-cms-platforms/). Please come by and check out more of my writing and other works!

Thanks for reading!