Creating websites these days has become effortless.
Many successful businesses have awesome websites using different programs where they do not have to write any code, and you can do it too.
With the popularity of no-code, questions such as “is no-code the future of creating websites?” are starting to pop up in people’s minds.
In this article, I will be discussing:
- What is No-Code?
- The No-Code Movement
- Pros & Cons of No-Code Platforms
- No-Code Platform Features
- Building Websites Without Coding
- Services That Allow You to Make a Website Without Coding
What is No-Code?
No-code is an approach in software development that allows non-programmers or those who have no technical skill to build websites or applications without writing codes.
Instead, you can do the process visually through a graphical interface and configuration.
It requires zero programming or coding skills to build a website. If you are not into the technical side of things, no-code can help you build a website by simply dragging and dropping software elements.
For non-technical folks, no-code removes the barrier mainly by making the process of building a website easier and accessible.
Many small businesses cannot hire a software developer or outsource to build their website because of financial setbacks.
With this innovation, you can now create a website of your own with a few steps.
No-code will be the go-to and alternative solution especially business owners who want to build a website of their own but can’t afford to pay for it.
The No-Code Movement
No-code movement has transformed the technological landscape and this "revolution" primarily helps the community by providing an alternative solution to programming and coding setbacks most of us have.
In business, product promotion and development can be frustrating when you need to update everything manually.
With manual coding, progress is slow. Your primary concern as a business owner will be the time it will take to get everything done, as it can affect the user experience of your customers.
Using no-code, you now have the opportunity to build whatever marketplace set-up you want faster and more affordable too.
Pros & Cons of No-Code Platforms
Today, no-code is widely used worldwide because of its user-friendliness. Workflows tend to get done fast and easily.
Pros of No-Code Platforms
An immediate solution to problems you have in terms of website development because you will be able to create software solutions without having to hire expert programmers.
Regardless of your degree, career, or position in a business, you can now build a website by yourself that will add value to your craft or business.
Building a website is faster and cheaper. Hiring developers will cost you a lot of money and with no-code, you will be able to cut the cost.
It will save you months and months of working since you can now build a website straight away without the need to code.
You will have creative freedom on what you want to add to your website since the process is more visual.
Obviously, with no-code, web developers will have less on their plates and can focus more on streamlining processes or creating new innovations.
Cons of No-Code Platforms
Security breaches with no-code are unavoidable, and once the platform you are using is affected by this factor, your website will be compromised as well.
You don't have the full authority with using no-code networks, so basically you are taking a risk in using such platforms.
You will not be able to customize software using the no-code platform.
You have to adapt your business process based on the capability feature of the no-code network or platform you are using.
No-Code Platform Features
Drag-and-drop interface
With no-code, you can simply grab virtual objects or elements on your screen and drag them to different locations or onto other elements you want to use.
It is a simple and easy feature most users enjoy as it's similar to imitating physical movement.
Whether you're new to building or designing a website, this feature is the main reason it is convenient to use no-code development platforms. With a quick drag and drop function, you can ensure the efficiency of your work.
Data connections
The majority of no-code systems are string along with database and server-side programs. Some systems also give you an option to connect to your preferred database.
This feature is helpful because it allows you to store underlying data or information when analyzing massive amounts of data.
User interface builder
User Interface (UI) builder is another great feature of no-code platforms. With this feature, you will be able to create pre-configured elements to build your website quickly.
With a UI builder, it's easier to access, understand, and facilitate your actions.
Visual modeling
With no-code, everything is visually modeled. You will be provided with information in a readable, visually presented form and is suited for users with no tech skills.
This visual model makes it easier see how your website will look like after all the drag-and-dropping; thus, making edits as you see fit.
Building Websites Without Coding
Creating a website is an essential skill you have to master, especially when planning to start a small business.
Knowing how to build a website on your own will save you from spending a significant portion of your hard-earned cash and time.
Work smarter, not harder.
Since no-code doesn’t require programming skills, you can just follow through these steps and build your own website. Here’s a guide if you’re a starter.
Choose A Website Builder Platform
In choosing a website building platform, the first thing to consider is the familiarity of its interface. Many platforms offer simple and easy to grasp interface, similar to creating simple documents, so you might as well start with a platform like that. The important thing is that it has some easy-to-use tools for editing. I recommend you use WordPress for an easy start. Plus, it’s free.
Pick A Domain
Picking a domain or name for your website may sound easy, and yes, it is fun and easy, but it still needs some brainstorming. While you have the freedom to use any name, picking the right domain can be a considerable part of your success, mainly for your brand awareness.
Pick A Theme or Appearance
Theme is the overall look of your website; it will create the whole context of your website. You don't have to be an expert in design to stand out. One thing to consider in choosing a theme is its cleanliness, not hard on the eye, professional-looking yet straightforward.
Customize Your Theme
Once you have set your theme, further customization is the next thing you have to do. It's more like doing some tweaks here and there to improve your website's overall look and feel. You can use your own creative approach as always and polish every element.
Create Pages
Pages are a vital part of the overall usability and technicality of your website. Visitors who visit your website normally land on your homepage, and when they want to look for more information, an easy-to-navigate menu page will guide them to find what they are looking for. Aside from the homepage, you must also have an About page, a Contact page, and of course, your product or service pages.
Adjust Navigation
Adjusting your site navigation is the next step you have to work on after you finish working on your web pages. Streamline your menus and widgets to make them easy to navigate for your site visitors. Once they find your website easy to navigate, there's a big chance they will find what they are looking for, and that may ultimately mean a conversion for you.
Test and Publish
After you finish the steps above, you can review and test everything for your final polishing to ensure everything is in place, every link is working, and each page is properly set up. If you're confident that all elements work and things look presentable, what's left to do now is publish your website.
Services That Allow You to Make a Website Without Coding
Running a business takes time and coding a site from scratch will take even more time.
But since you will not need a programmer to build your website still, you have to figure out what platform provides the best no-code service out there.
While plenty of website builder services offer solutions for your problem, choosing the best platform to use is a priority.
Wix
Wix is a site builder that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage, and develop your web presence precisely the way you want. With its simple interface and great templates, you can smoothly build your own high-quality website to promote your business, showcase your work, or start your own blog site.
Weebly
Weebly has great customizable web page designs and practical tools to help you build your website. You can start by creating a free website with its very user-friendly customizable drag and drop editor.
Webflow
This platform tagged itself as "the modern way to build for the web" as it allows users to build a professional website using its visual interface. It has thousands of templates you can use for your different content or e-commerce business.
Shopify
Shopify is perfect for your small e-commerce business; with hundreds of themes you can use for your branding customization. It is also compatible with both Android and iOS, so you can easily manage your business using your mobile device.
WordPress
If you're fond of writing and planning to start a blog site where you can publish your write-ups, WordPress is a go-to website builder for thousands of bloggers all over the world.
With its free feature, you can choose from hundreds of templates with free plugins, so it's all up to your creativity. WordPress is also SEO-friendly and easy to install.
Here is some useful information on how to make your website SEO-friendly when you can’t code.
Squarespace
If you are looking for another comprehensive platform to build your website, Squarespace is a platform that allows users to create as they will. Using a simple click and point function, you can easily customize all features you want.
Final Thoughts
Progress and development take place to improve our living conditions.
In terms of technology, changes happen because we want to find solutions to our current problems, and no-code is a solution for many who don't know how to program or write codes manually.
The idea of no-code is something we shouldn't be taking too much verbally. The world has been coding and learning to code day by day and, with that, there is a massive amount of code already written.
But that doesn't mean modifications are not needed. We still need someone to code regardless.
One might arrive at a logical conclusion that no-code is the future. One way or another, the possibility of getting there is probable, but essentially it will take some time.
To reach an age of absolute no-code, we need to outdo ourselves with artificial intelligence before anything else.
Once we discover how to create programs that can create a program of its own, written codes will endure in the future.
How about you? What do you think of no-code as the future of website building?
Until next time,
Kyle
Top comments (21)
Short answer? No.
This isn't happening anytime soon. I can comfortably agree with you No-Code platforms are an amazing and affordable way for small businesses to "go online", and a far better alternative than custom software development.
However, for any company that wants to scale into a medium to large sized business, or with requirements more advanced beyond a simple bare-bones website/marketplace/blog? Absolutely not. It's well known that any all-in-one easy-to-setup tool will have to sacrifice customizability (and thus, scalibility and flexibility). The same aplies to no-code platforms, and why they will never be taken seriously for medium or larger scale projects.
Go look at the clients for all those no-code-companies you mention, and try to find a single company on the scale of Facebook/Netflix that uses their platform for 90% of their code base. And this doesn't just apply to tech giants, the same will likely be true for general medium to large companies such as Walmart/Whirpool/Home Depot.
This👆
I always think that this holds because a visual interface only reduces complexity when a system is small and simple to oversee like a marketing site. When the company grows in scope a visual system will only making coding more complex, because there is simply too much to oversee in a node-diagram.
Added to that the fact that your no-code is also a highly complex system of code, it's obviously best to get down to the matter and fix things at the root instead of calling a vendor to fix your code for you everytime.
Depends how you define "website". For hobbyists, bloggers, etc., no-code has been the way to go for years. And in the early days, there were apps like Dreamweaver and Front Page - they weren't services like WordPress, but technically you didn't need to write code to create a site.
But for the thousands of companies who care about branding, and more importantly, whose product is a web app, no-code can't come close to fulfilling their needs.
I doubt in 20 years time they'll be a thing. We'll look back on no-code generation and and decide it was not the silver bullet people wanted. Half the problem isn't really the tech but if you ask a group of nontechnical people what they want and give them free reign, you'll end up with a mess regardless.
I've had the joys of dealing with Adalo for app creation. It's truly a terrible platform and we'd have saved money if we had just written the thing internally.
Same goes for Wordpess. Far quicker, easier and secure to build a site from scratch. You'll enter into a tech debt you don't want to be in otherwise.
I guess maybe if you literally want a non-functional, information based web site, no-code can work but the minute you want logic in there, I'd 100% avoid.
No-code for Websites was there for ages, it's not a new thing. We had Homesite, Frontpage, Dreamweaver for decades. RapidWeaver, Pinegrow and Bootstrap Studio (just to name a few) are great desktop site creation tools.
No-Code for software development is also not new, I remember the days in the early 90s on the Mac using a phantastic development environment called "Serious Developer", later bought by Novell and called "AppWare", and also low code platforms like FileMaker Pro are very powerful.
Brilliantly balanced article exploring the future of no-code. Well done!
I'm a full-stack developer and initially very skeptical that no-code could even begin to impact traditional methods of designing and building websites.
I'm still not an advocate of no-code will replace anything, especially with the advent of Jamstack, SPA's, headless/serverless and other emerging and developing technologies.
However, I dipped into no-code 8 months ago and have since published a few client websites. Depending on the no-code platform of choice it does offer some benefits. If you're a traditional developer and have a firm understanding of how websites are put together to begin with, no-code can offer a super-fast way to put a decent enough website together for a particular type of project.
When it comes to truly custom experiences that require even the smallest amount of interactivity with API's, modern databases, and scaling up cheaply, no-code isn't going to help. Yes there are ways in which to implement API's and databases via other no-code services such as Airtable but they cannot match the robustness and scalability of say document based or realt-time databases.
If your client requires something simple, fast, and manageable, then no-code is I think a viable option. Just don't expect it to be easily scalable without cost.
My concern is that new developers will claim to be "developers" who start with no-code with no clue of how a website actually works. Web development is a multi-faceted discipline which requires a keen understanding of how things work. If that's you, then use no-code to as an extra tool to push a certain breed of website faster.
Hi Kyle,
This is a very interesting article. I like very much how you explain in depth how building websites has changed and how no-code is making website building more accessible to many more internet users. If the internet is for everyone, then everyone should be able to use and contribute to it. Websites are the foundation of the internet (and will be the foundation of the new web3 vision as well)
I have to say, the no-code cons do not apply to all tools. I am building one ( pazly.dev ) that puts the user in control and has ownership of what they build as a core principle. It is not a platform, but a no-code website building tool.
To answer your initial question: Yes, I believe and hope no-code will be the primary way to building the websites of the future.
If we distinguish between web sites and web applications, then I'd agree that no-code has a good future. When Wix came out, my first thought was "Thank God, if someone asks me to do a website, I can point them at Wix". And it's still going.
It should be apparent that applications are almost always going to require code. While the advent of the Power Platform is designed to open up to "citizen developers", to call it no-code is kind of disingenuous given that it's a little more than drag-and-drop. But, as a "low-code" environment, it looks promising for some organizations.
There's always going to be a place for specialized developers. So-called citizen developers often do not have a background in computer science and will need custom components to use in their low-code applications. Real-world applications with real-world resource needs and cloud-native components simply aren't going to be made by anyone but a specialist.
I cannot believe there are only eight replies to this.
Is no-code the future? Yes. But not for at least twenty years, if not more.
My car is “no code”. I have no idea how it works. Most of the people who literally built it likely have no idea how it really works. And that’s great. I don’t want to know anything about my car. Cars aren’t my thing. But if even the slightest thing goes wrong with my car, I’m spending a very large amount of money to get it fixed.
This holds true for pretty much every single technology ever.
You can almost certainly create a no-code website right now. But you won’t be able to truly customize it the way you want, if at all. And if anything goes wrong, you’re spending a very large amount of money to get it fixed.
Twenty years from now? Sure. Fifty years from now? Definitely. Today? Pay someone to do it correctly or learn yourself.
It would be an irony that programmers would create tools so everyone could write software w/o any programming knowledge, and in that way take the jobs for lots of programmers. That would be the same as we would switch to all electric in order to save the planet, but the mining of minerals needed for it would destroy the planet even faster :)
For me the programmers that are working on no-programming tools are either ot s smart when looking in the future or just wish to earn lots of money for themselves and don't care for all other people in the industry. I agree that this is good for some trivia stuff, but not to go all the way in that idea, unless the idea is for robots (AI) to do all the programming and we all leaving w/o working anything which won't happen for sure, at least the second part.
I believe everyone has a different need and expectation from a website, generally speaking the person using a DIY website builder is primarily the hobby blogger, the small low budget business or the "tight" business owner that thinks my quotation is overpriced, these people will generally utilise "Pre-built" templates to build out their sites.
In my mind this is where things go wrong for them.
The ideology of a website should ALWAYS be content 1st, so a client gives you the content and as a designer you build the website around the content and display it with a methodical process using design principles to display that content.
Pre built themes on the other hand give you boxes to fill out, that are probably not the best approach as although every business is different, they are lumping you all together and then consequently your on-line business is not really any different to anyone else's in the same sector that has used the same theme ?
At the end of the day I do not believe "No-Code" will overtake coding, there will always be a place for content designed approach.
Guys there is something that is drag and drop for design and still let's you code, it's called Adobe xd and it is best of both worlds. It gives you the agility of rapid web design and the flexibility of any of your favorite js frameworks.
Checkout CoCreateJS cocreate.app
Its a low code framework for building collabrotive no-code platforms and apps.
Built using micro headless components. Easily add, replace or customize a component. Components are lazy loaded when needed.
Using CoCreateJS core components we have built a datatable, kanban, richtext editor, website builder, crm, cms. Combine them all together and you get the ulimate no-code platform capable of editing its self.
Imagine using wix, webflow etc. To edit wix, webflow to fit your needs.
Also CoCreateJS is collabrative. Displays users cursors in drag and drop UI and code editor. Allowing for coders and non coders to collaborate on websites and apps simultaneously.
I personally highly doubt no-code is the future of the web. Unless it makes more difficult use cases possible I really don't see a use for it outside the smaller websites. And even those are generally quite easy to click together in something like Wordpress as well.
My previous company was going through a transition phase so I got the chance to attend a course of a week which went into the in-depth features. Simple API related tasks were possible, but far from the use cases I encounter on my day-to-day tasks.
Hey Kyle, great article about the no/low code movement.
Teodor from Wappler here.
I checked the platforms your reviewed and maybe you want to check Wappler as well and let us know what you think.
It has none of the cons listed above and gives you complete freedom for your code, scalability and hosting, no lock ins. I'd be happy to welcome you in our community if you're interested in learning more about it and giving it a test drive.
Obviously positing this in a dev platform will attract a lot of aggression ,clearly the comments indicate that.
For small business and individuals obviously no code is the solution with over 100 million people using WordPress well it clearly shows it's solving a problem
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.