Posting Part I of the 6 part series on pagebuilders@AnthonySmith - you may publish as per convenience.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About PageBuilders* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
Part I: Introduction
The title, in case you were wondering, is a play on words on a movie by Woody Allen. And as the title suggests, this post is an introduction to the world of Pagebuilders. It is also the first of the a multi-part series on pagebuilders that I have written in collaboration with @Ympker. The idea behind this initiative is to pool our experiences together and create a reference of sorts for the LowEndSpirit community. Lets' call this an original content for LES. Image: Pixabay
Some of the posts in this series will focus on one or more available tools for a given category of pagebuilders. Others would be more generic in nature, and provide an overview of a particular tool or category. Without further delay, lets' dive into the topic right away.
So you are interested in knowing more about Pagebuilders, Eh?
If you look up discussions on sites like Quora, you would be inclined to believe that page builders exist for one type of Content Management System: Wordpress. This perception might be mostly true. Indeed, majority of page builders exist for this most commonly used content management platform. But if we look at the Universe of web hosting, or its subset, Content Management Systems, you will realize that page builders cover a much wider territory.
What is a Pagebuilder Anyway?
In a nutshell, a page builder is a visual tool, which will help in create web pages. The most common names that come to mind are:
This category of web design tools caters to two sets of audience. One category is people who are not comfortable with or familiar with coding. Particularly with the rise in the no-code movement, the usage of such drag and drop tools has gained popularity.
The second is website designers and digital agencies, who would rather focus on customizing the websites for speed, security, efficiency, and so on. For them, the ability to utilize existing tools helps them utilize their time more efficiently, which ultimately has a bearing on cost.
What are the advantages and limitations of Pagebuilders?
Advantages
One of the biggest advantages of using pagebuilders is they speed up the creation of pages. Flexibility, responsive. Many pagebuilders come with in built image search, codes for embed players, etc. This really adds to their appeal. In addition, there are features for greater user engagement, such as surveys, forms, etc.
Disadvantages or Limitations
Now we move to the disadvantages. First of all, you're relying on third party systems, many of which involve creating an account, and entering payment information. For poorly designed or maintained systems, this could lead to security issues. Next, depending on the pricing plan, scope of customization may be limited. A lot of providers offer free subscription plans, but they come with many limitations.
The level of control a user may have on the layout, features, etc. may be limited. In addition, many of these applications use closed source or proprietary software. This makes the user dependent on the provider for updates, security patches, and so on. Which is exactly the game some providers play.
As you will read in some of our subsequent posts, many of the Freemium models offer paid annual subscriptions. In other words, if you end the subscription, you are no longer able to use the service. Worse, you might be stuck with an older, unpatched version of the software.
For the sake of simplicity, I would like to classify pagebuilders into six categories:
1.The Big Boys
These services are commercially available to a very wide group of audience, and have a large user base. These large web hosts offer web hosting and have custom web builders. Examples include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Jimdo.
2. The Rising Stars
These cater to a smaller audience base. Examples of such service providers include (Carrd.co, Tilda.cc, Bookmark, Epicpixls, Voog).
3.Page builders offered by hosting companies such as Page builders offered by hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Namechaep, Dynadot, etc. are also included in this list. The pagebuilder offered by Softaculous (Sitepad) also features in this list. Installtron or Cloudron might also offer similar applications.
4.Desktop apps such as Mobirise, 8b.
5.Pagebuilders for Wordpress
As mentioned in the first half of this post, there are numerous options for pagebuilders for Wordpress . Examples include Elementor, Divi, Brizy. We will cover some of these in detail in a subsequent post.
6.Landing page creators
This is the broadest category in our list, and can include mailing list; video hosting; and CRM services. Some of the examples in this list include Mailchimp, Hippovideo, Hubspot, and builder.io.
Bookmark.com
Intrigued (or confused) enough?
Don't worry, we will cover the above categories in sufficient detail in the following posts. We hope this will help you clear the air on the topic of pagebuilders.
How This Series is Structured
Most blogs, tutorials, and review sites cover the "Big Boys" in sufficient depth, therefore we will not talk about them in this series. We will also not cover the pagebuilders offered by hosting companies for similar reasons. We may, however, include a short review of Softaculous in the last part of this series.
The subsequent posts will be as follows:
Part II : Pagebuilders: The Rising Stars
Part III : Pagebuilders: Desktop App
Part IV : Pagebuilders for WordPress - Part I
Part V: Pagebuilders for WordPress- part II
Part VI: Landing Page Creators (This will also be the concluding part of this series)
So, the other day @vyas asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a joint-post about various Page Builders with him. Given that I have used a bunch of different page builders already, I thought this might be a nice little addition to our forum.
I will give you guys a short summary of my experience with:
-Divi (ElegantThemes; WordPress),
-Mobirise (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Pagebuilder),
-Architect (HTML&CSS Pagebuilder) and
-Pinegrow (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap, Foundation and WordPress Theme Maker Addon).
All of these are great Pagebuilders and I appreciate them for what they are. Like with many things in life, I wouldn't call any of them perfect. I'm still waiting for the Ultimate Pagebuilder that unites all of my favourite features of these in one Pagebuilder but I guess that's not gonna happen.Anyway, I will try to give you an insight on what you can expect from each of the Pagebuilders I mentioned and perhaps get a better idea of which Pagebuilder might be suitable for your project .
May I request a small update to the blog post “compilation of free shared hosting offers”...
the “remark” under Hostingcubes in the table
has a mention “1 yr”. The intention was to convey that the renewal happens annually. It is causing confusion...
May I request a small update to the blog post “compilation of free shared hosting offers”...
the “remark” under Hostingcubes in the table
has a mention “1 yr”. The intention was to convey that the renewal happens annually. It is causing confusion...
Side note, I was thinking about these posts last night actually, while I know they are HUGE when combined, I am again wondering if they lose impact if posted individually as it is no longer a comparison.
That said they stand up in their own right so individually is fine but it is no longer a comparison if you know what I mean?
Still leaning towards separate posts (daily) but wanted to give that thought again.
@Ympker said:
Just chiming in (sorry to disrupt): When is the first pagebuilder post scheduled to go live?
See:
@AnthonySmith said:
Ok, when you are ready please make a new individual posts in the Writers section with the formatting as you want it titled as:
Part 1: Title
Part 2: Title
Part 3: Title
etc etc
That will make sure I don't mess up and I will be able to locate them quickly
Ah, but I think @vyas already posted the introductional post as ready to go. About the other posts, my latest posts are ready to go as-is. Just waiting for @vyas to give the go we can post them. You can just use the latest version of the Divi/Pinegrow/Architect/Mobirise posts I posted. It's true that the comparison gets a bit lost when the posts are singled out but I think all together will be a bit much eh? Ofc if seperated into chapters probably ppl could read one chapter at a time and have them all bundled up if searching for a review.
@vyas said: Posting Part I of the 6 part series on pagebuilders@AnthonySmith - you may publish as per convenience.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About PageBuilders* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
Part I: Introduction
The title, in case you were wondering, is a play on words on a movie by Woody Allen. And as the title suggests, this post is an introduction to the world of Pagebuilders. It is also the first of the a multi-part series on pagebuilders that I have written in collaboration with @Ympker. The idea behind this initiative is to pool our experiences together and create a reference of sorts for the LowEndSpirit community. Lets' call this an original content for LES. Image: Pixabay
Some of the posts in this series will focus on one or more available tools for a given category of pagebuilders. Others would be more generic in nature, and provide an overview of a particular tool or category. Without further delay, lets' dive into the topic right away.
So you are interested in knowing more about Pagebuilders, Eh?
If you look up discussions on sites like Quora, you would be inclined to believe that page builders exist for one type of Content Management System: Wordpress. This perception might be mostly true. Indeed, majority of page builders exist for this most commonly used content management platform. But if we look at the Universe of web hosting, or its subset, Content Management Systems, you will realize that page builders cover a much wider territory.
What is a Pagebuilder Anyway?
In a nutshell, a page builder is a visual tool, which will help in create web pages. The most common names that come to mind are:
This category of web design tools caters to two sets of audience. One category is people who are not comfortable with or familiar with coding. Particularly with the rise in the no-code movement, the usage of such drag and drop tools has gained popularity.
The second is website designers and digital agencies, who would rather focus on customizing the websites for speed, security, efficiency, and so on. For them, the ability to utilize existing tools helps them utilize their time more efficiently, which ultimately has a bearing on cost.
What are the advantages and limitations of Pagebuilders?
Advantages
One of the biggest advantages of using pagebuilders is they speed up the creation of pages. Flexibility, responsive. Many pagebuilders come with in built image search, codes for embed players, etc. This really adds to their appeal. In addition, there are features for greater user engagement, such as surveys, forms, etc.
Disadvantages or Limitations
Now we move to the disadvantages. First of all, you're relying on third party systems, many of which involve creating an account, and entering payment information. For poorly designed or maintained systems, this could lead to security issues. Next, depending on the pricing plan, scope of customization may be limited. A lot of providers offer free subscription plans, but they come with many limitations.
The level of control a user may have on the layout, features, etc. may be limited. In addition, many of these applications use closed source or proprietary software. This makes the user dependent on the provider for updates, security patches, and so on. Which is exactly the game some providers play.
As you will read in some of our subsequent posts, many of the Freemium models offer paid annual subscriptions. In other words, if you end the subscription, you are no longer able to use the service. Worse, you might be stuck with an older, unpatched version of the software.
For the sake of simplicity, I would like to classify pagebuilders into six categories:
1.The Big Boys
These services are commercially available to a very wide group of audience, and have a large user base. These large web hosts offer web hosting and have custom web builders. Examples include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Jimdo.
2. The Rising Stars
These cater to a smaller audience base. Examples of such service providers include (Carrd.co, Tilda.cc, Bookmark, Epicpixls, Voog).
3.Page builders offered by hosting companies such as Page builders offered by hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Namechaep, Dynadot, etc. are also included in this list. The pagebuilder offered by Softaculous (Sitepad) also features in this list. Installtron or Cloudron might also offer similar applications.
4.Desktop apps such as Mobirise, 8b.
5.Pagebuilders for Wordpress
As mentioned in the first half of this post, there are numerous options for pagebuilders for Wordpress . Examples include Elementor, Divi, Brizy. We will cover some of these in detail in a subsequent post.
6.Landing page creators
This is the broadest category in our list, and can include mailing list; video hosting; and CRM services. Some of the examples in this list include Mailchimp, Hippovideo, Hubspot, and builder.io.
Bookmark.com
Intrigued (or confused) enough?
Don't worry, we will cover the above categories in sufficient detail in the following posts. We hope this will help you clear the air on the topic of pagebuilders.
How This Series is Structured
Most blogs, tutorials, and review sites cover the "Big Boys" in sufficient depth, therefore we will not talk about them in this series. We will also not cover the pagebuilders offered by hosting companies for similar reasons. We may, however, include a short review of Softaculous in the last part of this series.
The subsequent posts will be as follows:
Part II : Pagebuilders: The Rising Stars
Part III : Pagebuilders: Desktop App
Part IV : Pagebuilders for WordPress - Part I
Part V: Pagebuilders for WordPress- part II
Part VI: Landing Page Creators (This will also be the concluding part of this series)
So, the other day @vyas asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a joint-post about various Page Builders with him. Given that I have used a bunch of different page builders already, I thought this might be a nice little addition to our forum.
I will give you guys a short summary of my experience with:
-Divi (ElegantThemes; WordPress),
-Mobirise (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap Pagebuilder),
-Architect (HTML&CSS Pagebuilder) and
-Pinegrow (HTML&CSS + Bootstrap, Foundation and WordPress Theme Maker Addon).
All of these are great Pagebuilders and I appreciate them for what they are. Like with many things in life, I wouldn't call any of them perfect. I'm still waiting for the Ultimate Pagebuilder that unites all of my favourite features of these in one Pagebuilder but I guess that's not gonna happen.Anyway, I will try to give you an insight on what you can expect from each of the Pagebuilders I mentioned and perhaps get a better idea of which Pagebuilder might be suitable for your project .
Right, but I asked for separate new posts under the writer's section category so I know which parts to put in which order rather than using this thread which is a bit of a mess now.
So, as a result, I missed that and I thought I was waiting for you and you through you were waiting for me
I will grab that then and post it today, please make a new discussion post for part 2 so I don't miss it
Haha that makes sense. Yeah, I am really busy these days and just was wondering when it'd be published. No worries
Then @vyas can pick any of our finished posts and post it as 2nd part accordingly (or tell me which one I should post as second one). If it's one of mine they are already fully there :P
I should get my Mac tomorrow so other parts will come faster.
@Ympker agreed your posts are ready but I am adding some seo juice. Keywords, internal/external links, smart ‘alt’ tag for images, etc. Thats what is taking time as well.
@vyas said:
I should get my Mac tomorrow so other parts will come faster.
@Ympker agreed your posts are ready but I am adding some seo juice. Keywords, internal/external links, smart ‘alt’ tag for images, etc. Thats what is taking time as well.
I just added the header giving you credit, I added 'click arrow to expand' on the reveal tags as it was not obvious and finally just linked the mentions e.g. @vyas@ymker to your forum profiles good time to take advantage of the About Me: feature on the forum I announced yesterday!
Finally, I removed a couple of little errors in spaces and hyphens and removed an 'and' after a comma, and one of the bits had the text doubled.
@Ympker said: 3.Page builders offered by hosting companies such as Page builders offered by hosting companies such as
Sure that sounds good! Also, thanks for removing these tiny bits of errors. It always happens to me that after some time I just seem to turn blind on further errors, after re-reading for the n-th time.
@AnthonySmith , posting #Part II below. Posting in two segments since the post is LONG.
Everything you wanted to know about Pagebuilders...Part II
Introduction to part II of this series
In this post, we will briefly mention the leading web hosting companies who also have their custom pagebuilders. But the main focus of this post will be on the "Younger Siblings" as we had described in Part I of this series. Specifically, we will talk about Carrd.co, Brizy, and Bookmark pagebuilders. I have used each of these services quite regularly over the years, and am quite confident that you will find them useful.
Webhosts with Pagebuilders
The audience for LES probably might not be interested in off the shelf hosting solutions provided by large providers like Squarespace, Wix and similar. Therefore, we will move on to the next type of pagebuilders. We will affectionately call them the "younger siblings" of the Big Boys.
For those who are keen to know more about the "Big Boys" can click the arrow below to read.
Optional reading
There have been many posts about the large hosting companies that offer drag and drop functionality for creating websites. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Jimdo are some such popular services. These services have a widespread use, many of them feature in the Top 10 lists for Content Magagement Sytems. In particulay Squarespace, Shopify, Wix and Weebly can be considered as mass market products. The advantage of these services is that they offer a 'plug and play' model, that is, sign up, choose an existing template, and customize it to suit needs. They offers speed, convenience, and are beginner friendly How Tos. The tutorials or How Tos are offered by the providers themselves, or third party sites.On the flip side, they tend to be expensive, and might not be a good fit for everyone.
The Younger Siblings
Younger siblings are companies that cater to a smaller audience, or a niche market. Some of these services include:
Stacksocial has a list of many new and relatively unknown page builders. You may check it out here.
A rough estimate shows that are over 100 different types of pagebuilders !
But don't worry , we will only cover three of these services in detail in the sections below.
Carrd.co
Carrd.co is a page builder, as well as a web hosting platform. It is great for designers. freelancers, and professionals looking to create their portfolio or personal sites. It is a fairly popular service among those who are familiar with the world of pagebuilders. Its servers are in the United States, which has caused a headache or two for me due to low network speeds. More on that later.
I came to know about this service through one of the mailers. Initially, I was rather skeptical but when I looked it up, I was actually impressed and I signed up for it.
Kicking the Tyres
Carrd.co offers a freemium service. You can start with the free model to try this service out. In order to do so, you can choose one of their pre built themes or pre built templates. There are templates for a Landing Page, a signup or a feedback form, a portfolio page or a personal page.
Once the layout is selected, you are taken to a page where you get the basic instructions where you can change the text, the font size etc. You can simply edit the fields and you will be good to go in minutes! Note that the fields are customizable.
Optional : Watch the video
In the accompanying video, you will find a screenshot tour 'walkthrough'. My intent is to show how you can create a very simple webpage. I have opted for a very simple Card layout. In other words, the website would be one pager with a picture, name and social media contact details.
From "Alex Smith", I change that to my name. Next I changed my image-I put my same image as my avatar on LES. You can change the font size and also change the pattern by adding a drag and drop shadow.
You can preview the draft site in desktop mode and mobile more. Once you are ready to publish, you only have to enter your contact details.
Click to see the test site
I already have a Pro Standard account with carrd.co, and this does offer some additional features like using custom domain, and pro templates. You can add your own stock images own images or use one of the pre built stock images from unsplash, etc.
Information on the tiers, features, for the pricing plans is available here: https://carrd.co/pro
Carrd.co is under active development- most recently it was updated about three weeks ago the time of posting this message. AJ, the founder and creator of Carrd.co, is the person behind html5up.
Give carrd.co a try, you will be pleasantly surprised!
Tip: If you are considering a paid plan, look out for the deals around Black Friday. You get a 50% discount on the pro plan which typically cost, 20, US dollars, will end up costing you less than 10. For that amount, you can get 10 one-page websites.
####What is this service best for
Carrd is great for making a portfolio page, a landing page, and you can also have your resume up there. Or you can just create quick one page site for your friends, your family, your girlfriend, boyfriend, as the case may be.
You can clone a site, that it, create a staging site and a production site if you wish. that gives an advantage of creating multiple options inc are you want to seek approval from the client or the person(s) you are creating the site for.
Quirks and limitations
I have two problems with this service:
1. In India, I get low speeds. This makes the creation and loading of the site very slow. I had reached out to AJ back in December 2018, and he had suggested that I use Cloudflare or any other CDN. I did try that, but to no avail. In Europe and North America, speeds might be better.
2. Sometimes, the sites go into something called as 'initialising' mode. This happens probably for 5 minutes every month. For that period, the sites are inaccessible. Recently, I received a mailer from AJ that required me to change the servers for my sites. Maybe with the new server(s) this problem will go away.
3. You can export the site in the higher price tiers only (Pro Plus and Pro Max)
Summing it all up
I am a very happy user of carrd.co; and would recommend it if you are looking for a no frills site that is quick so set up.
In spite of the minor quirks, I give it a thumbs up.
Support page on Carrd.co
Carrd.co also has good documentation, I am adding the link to their support page for reference.
Let us take a look at bookmark.com. I learnt about this page builder + web host through a facebook group. The specifications they offered did not impress me much initially. But upon closer look, there was one feature about bookmark made me sign up: the AI backed website builder (AIDA).
Signing up and pricing plans
Bookmark also follows the freemium model. Like other services, in order to use a custom domain, one has to sign up for the paid plans, which start at 12 US dollars a month on an annual subscription.This tier puts you in the 'unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage' category. Like many members of LES, I am also skeptical about anything 'unlilmited'. Inspire of my reservations, I had purchased the 2 website plan. It made the pricing attractive.
Creating a website
Initially I found AIDA to be gimmicky! But creating a website is fast and super easy with AIDA. In the included video, you can see how I have created a sample website in a very short time.
Customizing the fields
Once the website is created, you can change the fields to your liking: fonts, colours, images and more. This can be done manually or using AIDA, again. It is difficult to change the type of website- for example, from a blog to a photo gallery. Also, the layout cannot be changed easily once it has been chosen. You might be better off re-creating the website. You can save as many sites as you like, until you publish them. The upper limit to the number of published sites is the number of sites included in your plan.
Optional reading
Websites in Draft Folder
I liked the option of a drafts folder- where you can save layouts before choosing one for the actual site. This is useful if you are creating website for a client or stakeholders, and you would need approval for doing the same. You can store multiple draft websites, and delete the ones you no longer need.
e-Learning Courses
Bookmark.com offers some e-learning courses as a part of their paid packages, or you can subscribe to them independently.
Images and videos
Bookmark offers integration with stock image websites, and you can replace the images that come with the stock website. You can also upload your own images, or save them from google drive onto your bookmark.com folder. The site claims there is no upper limit on the number of images or their size. I have not stress-tested the system, so I cannot comment on the actual limits if any.
Concluding remarks
Bookmark is largely catered towards web designers and agencies who want to use the white label service for their clients. But the ease of creating a website using AIDA may make it an attractive option for the non-technically-inclined user. Pricing wise, it becomes quite expensive for the causal user beyond the $12 a month plan.
Brizy is an interesting beast, and I mean it in a good way. This service can called as hybrid. It is a pagebuilder and a web host. In that sense, it falls under the "younger siblings" category. They also offer cloud hosting, which uses their custom page builder.
a. You can download the .zip file that has the readymade site, simply upload it on your server, unpack it, and you are good to go. This is a great option if you are not planning to update the site regularly. That is, you are looking to create a static site. This is the "Export HTML" option.
b. The other option is to use your website as a 'front' face, but the page creation, image hosting, etc. happens from brizy. You can update the pages or the data on the webpages, and the content will be sync'ed dynamically with your website. This is the "Server Sync" Option.
The other two options- allow you to host on Brizy using your own custom domain, or use a subdomain with a "subdomain.brizy.io" extension. This option is the default for the free tier. Brizy also offers aWordPress plugin, which we might cover in a subsequent part of this series.
The real interesting option is the way in which you can host a website on your own server.
Brizy has three pricing tiers: Free account, Pro Personal Plan, and Pro Studio Plan. The pricing is at the mid segment : US $ 49 / year for Personal Pro and $ 99 for Pro Studio.
Here is the interesting part: under the free account, you can link 1 custom domain or sub domain. That is, you get one website hosted for free.
Similarly, under the Pro Personal Plan, you can link upto 3 custom domains or subdomains. In the Pro Studio plan there is no upper limit.You can visit the pricing page on their website for details.
Brizy currently has a 'lifetime' deal running, something you can notice in bold at the top of their website.
Click to see the test site
SSL
Both Custom Domain and Brizy Subdomain publishing options come with free SSL included. According to their website, SSL "Takes up to 24 hours to be installed." In my experience, it DOES take 24 hours for the ssl to be set up.
CDN
Brizy has a list of POPs on their website, which they use for free and paid tiers. Particularly under the paid plan, the CDN locations in Asia Pacific region is quite extensive. This makes it an attractive proposition.
Hosting is on amazon EC2, image processing by Fastly, and their CDN provider may be a name familiar to most readers in the ES community: BunnyCDN.
Overall, they seem to have chosen some good Infrastructure providers, which means that eh performance is expected to be above par. One concern I have about such services is the price they have to pay to the providers. Amazon' s AWS in particular can get expensive. This aspect is best illustrated int he below video.
I really like this option. For this review, I have included a video made from screen captures.I created a test site on Brizy cloud, and hosted it on the shared hosting site. I thought this was a good way to put to use the Black Friday offer from 2019 by Gullo's Hosting.
I really like Brizy and the simplicity and options it offers. In particular, you can create a rather complex page (or series of pages) and publish them in a variety of ways. This product is under active development. On the flip side, there are bugs, and the Wordpress plugin had a security incident a couple of months ago. Brizy is worth a try- heck, they offer free of 1 website.
Conclusion: Part II
This wraps up part II of this 6 part series. Hope you found the Sitebuilder options discussed in this post useful. The list I have posted at the beginning of this article is by no means exhaustive. But I thought the best way to create value for the readers was by writing about services that I have used first hand. With that logic, I should have even covered Sitepad, but that is a post for another day. Hope you find the mini-reviews useful. As always, looking forward to your comments, feedback and recommendations if any.
@AnthonySmith
Some formatting not working in Vanilla.
E.g table of contents. I have therefore removed it. Also video player resolution is looking crappy in mobile view. I tried, but no avail yet. Needs some more digging around, else happy to post on Vimeo/YT and post link.
My learning: not all markdowns are created equal.
Some Interesting numbers: when I ran this post through SEO tool it gave the following details. As a coincidence, this post falls in the median. Stats of this post in the parenthesis.
Keywords: pagebuilder pagebuilders website design (used all of them)
Text length: 2024 - 2474 words (this post is at 2435 words)
SEO Title Length (max 65 symbols): 8 - 10 words (Title: 9 words)
H1 title length: 7 - 9 words (7 Words)
Description Length: 21 - 27 words (50 words)
Keyword density: 2% (1.8%)
Comments
Good read
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
Posting Part I of the 6 part series on pagebuilders @AnthonySmith - you may publish as per convenience.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About PageBuilders* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)
Part I: Introduction
The title, in case you were wondering, is a play on words on a movie by Woody Allen. And as the title suggests, this post is an introduction to the world of Pagebuilders. It is also the first of the a multi-part series on pagebuilders that I have written in collaboration with @Ympker. The idea behind this initiative is to pool our experiences together and create a reference of sorts for the LowEndSpirit community. Lets' call this an original content for LES.
Image: Pixabay
Some of the posts in this series will focus on one or more available tools for a given category of pagebuilders. Others would be more generic in nature, and provide an overview of a particular tool or category. Without further delay, lets' dive into the topic right away.
So you are interested in knowing more about Pagebuilders, Eh?
If you look up discussions on sites like Quora, you would be inclined to believe that page builders exist for one type of Content Management System: Wordpress. This perception might be mostly true. Indeed, majority of page builders exist for this most commonly used content management platform. But if we look at the Universe of web hosting, or its subset, Content Management Systems, you will realize that page builders cover a much wider territory.
What is a Pagebuilder Anyway?
Site builders offered by Squarespace or Wix
or
add-ons or plugins for WordPress, such as elementor, Divi and Brizy.
But the story does not end there. Over the years, I have even used some pagebuilders, without realizing what I was using. Here's an example:
Remember this Logo?
Hint
or
Another Hint
if you are not prone to getting too nostalgic, Wikipedia has great list of HTML editors that I believe were the pre-cursors to today's website creation tools. You may be familiar with some of them: Bluefish, Google Web Designer, Dreamweaver, and Seamonkey.
Okay, but...who uses Pagebuilders Anyway?
This category of web design tools caters to two sets of audience. One category is people who are not comfortable with or familiar with coding. Particularly with the rise in the no-code movement, the usage of such drag and drop tools has gained popularity.
The second is website designers and digital agencies, who would rather focus on customizing the websites for speed, security, efficiency, and so on. For them, the ability to utilize existing tools helps them utilize their time more efficiently, which ultimately has a bearing on cost.
What are the advantages and limitations of Pagebuilders?
Advantages
One of the biggest advantages of using pagebuilders is they speed up the creation of pages. Flexibility, responsive. Many pagebuilders come with in built image search, codes for embed players, etc. This really adds to their appeal. In addition, there are features for greater user engagement, such as surveys, forms, etc.
Disadvantages or Limitations
Now we move to the disadvantages. First of all, you're relying on third party systems, many of which involve creating an account, and entering payment information. For poorly designed or maintained systems, this could lead to security issues. Next, depending on the pricing plan, scope of customization may be limited. A lot of providers offer free subscription plans, but they come with many limitations.
The level of control a user may have on the layout, features, etc. may be limited. In addition, many of these applications use closed source or proprietary software. This makes the user dependent on the provider for updates, security patches, and so on. Which is exactly the game some providers play.
Are All Pagebuilders Created Equal?
The short answer is no.
For the sake of simplicity, I would like to classify pagebuilders into six categories:
1.The Big Boys
These services are commercially available to a very wide group of audience, and have a large user base. These large web hosts offer web hosting and have custom web builders. Examples include Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Jimdo.
2. The Rising Stars
These cater to a smaller audience base. Examples of such service providers include (Carrd.co, Tilda.cc, Bookmark, Epicpixls, Voog).
3.Page builders offered by hosting companies such as Page builders offered by hosting companies such as GoDaddy, Namechaep, Dynadot, etc. are also included in this list. The pagebuilder offered by Softaculous (Sitepad) also features in this list. Installtron or Cloudron might also offer similar applications.
4.Desktop apps such as Mobirise, 8b.
5.Pagebuilders for Wordpress
As mentioned in the first half of this post, there are numerous options for pagebuilders for Wordpress . Examples include Elementor, Divi, Brizy. We will cover some of these in detail in a subsequent post.
6.Landing page creators
This is the broadest category in our list, and can include mailing list; video hosting; and CRM services. Some of the examples in this list include Mailchimp, Hippovideo, Hubspot, and builder.io.
Bookmark.com
Intrigued (or confused) enough?
Don't worry, we will cover the above categories in sufficient detail in the following posts. We hope this will help you clear the air on the topic of pagebuilders.
How This Series is Structured
Most blogs, tutorials, and review sites cover the "Big Boys" in sufficient depth, therefore we will not talk about them in this series. We will also not cover the pagebuilders offered by hosting companies for similar reasons. We may, however, include a short review of Softaculous in the last part of this series.
The subsequent posts will be as follows:
Part II : Pagebuilders: The Rising Stars
Part III : Pagebuilders: Desktop App
Part IV : Pagebuilders for WordPress - Part I
Part V: Pagebuilders for WordPress- part II
Part VI: Landing Page Creators (This will also be the concluding part of this series)
Note from @ympker about this project
Screenshot of Brizy Pagebuilder by A Vyas
blog | exploring visually |
Lookin good! Thanks @vyas
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
@AnthonySmith
May I request a small update to the blog post “compilation of free shared hosting offers”...
the “remark” under Hostingcubes in the table
has a mention “1 yr”. The intention was to convey that the renewal happens annually. It is causing confusion...
Can that be changed to “renews after 1 yr”?
Thanks
p.s Part II of the series coming later today.
blog | exploring visually |
Done.
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Just chiming in (sorry to disrupt): When is the first pagebuilder post scheduled to go live?
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
See:
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Side note, I was thinking about these posts last night actually, while I know they are HUGE when combined, I am again wondering if they lose impact if posted individually as it is no longer a comparison.
That said they stand up in their own right so individually is fine but it is no longer a comparison if you know what I mean?
Still leaning towards separate posts (daily) but wanted to give that thought again.
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Ah, but I think @vyas already posted the introductional post as ready to go. About the other posts, my latest posts are ready to go as-is. Just waiting for @vyas to give the go we can post them. You can just use the latest version of the Divi/Pinegrow/Architect/Mobirise posts I posted. It's true that the comparison gets a bit lost when the posts are singled out but I think all together will be a bit much eh? Ofc if seperated into chapters probably ppl could read one chapter at a time and have them all bundled up if searching for a review.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
Right, but I asked for separate new posts under the writer's section category so I know which parts to put in which order rather than using this thread which is a bit of a mess now.
So, as a result, I missed that and I thought I was waiting for you and you through you were waiting for me
I will grab that then and post it today, please make a new discussion post for part 2 so I don't miss it
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Haha that makes sense. Yeah, I am really busy these days and just was wondering when it'd be published. No worries
Then @vyas can pick any of our finished posts and post it as 2nd part accordingly (or tell me which one I should post as second one). If it's one of mine they are already fully there :P
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
https://lowendspirit.com/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-pagebuilders-but-were-afraid-to-ask
posted.
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
I should get my Mac tomorrow so other parts will come faster.
@Ympker agreed your posts are ready but I am adding some seo juice. Keywords, internal/external links, smart ‘alt’ tag for images, etc. Thats what is taking time as well.
Sorry about that
blog | exploring visually |
No worries
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
I updated a few little bits hope you don't mind.
I just added the header giving you credit, I added 'click arrow to expand' on the reveal tags as it was not obvious and finally just linked the mentions e.g. @vyas @ymker to your forum profiles
good time to take advantage of the About Me: feature on the forum I announced yesterday!
Finally, I removed a couple of little errors in spaces and hyphens and removed an 'and' after a comma, and one of the bits had the text doubled.
example ^
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
How do you guys feel about me publishing the direct forum link for these as well to improve engagement?
The hidden post: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/1135/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-pagebuilders-but-were-afraid-to-ask
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Sure that sounds good! Also, thanks for removing these tiny bits of errors. It always happens to me that after some time I just seem to turn blind on further errors, after re-reading for the n-th time.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
That works, anything to help engagement...
@AnthonySmith
Thx for some reformatting.
The post actually reads better in the hidden link version...
blog | exploring visually |
@AnthonySmith , posting #Part II below. Posting in two segments since the post is LONG.
Everything you wanted to know about Pagebuilders...Part II
Introduction to part II of this series
In this post, we will briefly mention the leading web hosting companies who also have their custom pagebuilders. But the main focus of this post will be on the "Younger Siblings" as we had described in Part I of this series. Specifically, we will talk about Carrd.co, Brizy, and Bookmark pagebuilders. I have used each of these services quite regularly over the years, and am quite confident that you will find them useful.
Webhosts with Pagebuilders
For those who are keen to know more about the "Big Boys" can click the arrow below to read.
Optional reading
There have been many posts about the large hosting companies that offer drag and drop functionality for creating websites. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Jimdo are some such popular services. These services have a widespread use, many of them feature in the Top 10 lists for Content Magagement Sytems. In particulay Squarespace, Shopify, Wix and Weebly can be considered as mass market products. The advantage of these services is that they offer a 'plug and play' model, that is, sign up, choose an existing template, and customize it to suit needs. They offers speed, convenience, and are beginner friendly How Tos. The tutorials or How Tos are offered by the providers themselves, or third party sites.On the flip side, they tend to be expensive, and might not be a good fit for everyone.
The Younger Siblings
Younger siblings are companies that cater to a smaller audience, or a niche market. Some of these services include:
Stacksocial has a list of many new and relatively unknown page builders. You may check it out here.
But don't worry , we will only cover three of these services in detail in the sections below.
Carrd.co
Carrd.co is a page builder, as well as a web hosting platform. It is great for designers. freelancers, and professionals looking to create their portfolio or personal sites. It is a fairly popular service among those who are familiar with the world of pagebuilders. Its servers are in the United States, which has caused a headache or two for me due to low network speeds. More on that later.
I came to know about this service through one of the mailers. Initially, I was rather skeptical but when I looked it up, I was actually impressed and I signed up for it.
Kicking the Tyres
Carrd.co offers a freemium service. You can start with the free model to try this service out. In order to do so, you can choose one of their pre built themes or pre built templates. There are templates for a Landing Page, a signup or a feedback form, a portfolio page or a personal page.
Once the layout is selected, you are taken to a page where you get the basic instructions where you can change the text, the font size etc. You can simply edit the fields and you will be good to go in minutes! Note that the fields are customizable.
Optional : Watch the video
In the accompanying video, you will find a screenshot tour 'walkthrough'. My intent is to show how you can create a very simple webpage. I have opted for a very simple Card layout. In other words, the website would be one pager with a picture, name and social media contact details.
Alternate link to video
In case the above link to the video does not work,
I am posting an alternate link to the screenshot tour of carrd.co
Customizing the fields
From "Alex Smith", I change that to my name. Next I changed my image-I put my same image as my avatar on LES. You can change the font size and also change the pattern by adding a drag and drop shadow.
You can preview the draft site in desktop mode and mobile more. Once you are ready to publish, you only have to enter your contact details.
Click to see the test site
I already have a Pro Standard account with carrd.co, and this does offer some additional features like using custom domain, and pro templates. You can add your own stock images own images or use one of the pre built stock images from unsplash, etc.
Carrd.co is under active development- most recently it was updated about three weeks ago the time of posting this message. AJ, the founder and creator of Carrd.co, is the person behind html5up.
Give carrd.co a try, you will be pleasantly surprised!
####What is this service best for
Quirks and limitations
I have two problems with this service:
1. In India, I get low speeds. This makes the creation and loading of the site very slow. I had reached out to AJ back in December 2018, and he had suggested that I use Cloudflare or any other CDN. I did try that, but to no avail. In Europe and North America, speeds might be better.
2. Sometimes, the sites go into something called as 'initialising' mode. This happens probably for 5 minutes every month. For that period, the sites are inaccessible. Recently, I received a mailer from AJ that required me to change the servers for my sites. Maybe with the new server(s) this problem will go away.
3. You can export the site in the higher price tiers only (Pro Plus and Pro Max)
Summing it all up
I am a very happy user of carrd.co; and would recommend it if you are looking for a no frills site that is quick so set up.
In spite of the minor quirks, I give it a thumbs up.
Support page on Carrd.co
Carrd.co also has good documentation, I am adding the link to their support page for reference.
blog | exploring visually |
@anthonysmith Post II Continued
Bookmark.com
Introduction
Let us take a look at bookmark.com. I learnt about this page builder + web host through a facebook group. The specifications they offered did not impress me much initially. But upon closer look, there was one feature about bookmark made me sign up: the AI backed website builder (AIDA).
Signing up and pricing plans
Bookmark also follows the freemium model. Like other services, in order to use a custom domain, one has to sign up for the paid plans, which start at 12 US dollars a month on an annual subscription.This tier puts you in the 'unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage' category. Like many members of LES, I am also skeptical about anything 'unlilmited'. Inspire of my reservations, I had purchased the 2 website plan. It made the pricing attractive.
Creating a website
Initially I found AIDA to be gimmicky! But creating a website is fast and super easy with AIDA. In the included video, you can see how I have created a sample website in a very short time.
Customizing the fields
Once the website is created, you can change the fields to your liking: fonts, colours, images and more. This can be done manually or using AIDA, again. It is difficult to change the type of website- for example, from a blog to a photo gallery. Also, the layout cannot be changed easily once it has been chosen. You might be better off re-creating the website. You can save as many sites as you like, until you publish them. The upper limit to the number of published sites is the number of sites included in your plan.
Optional reading
Websites in Draft Folder
I liked the option of a drafts folder- where you can save layouts before choosing one for the actual site. This is useful if you are creating website for a client or stakeholders, and you would need approval for doing the same. You can store multiple draft websites, and delete the ones you no longer need.
e-Learning Courses
Bookmark.com offers some e-learning courses as a part of their paid packages, or you can subscribe to them independently.
Images and videos
Bookmark offers integration with stock image websites, and you can replace the images that come with the stock website. You can also upload your own images, or save them from google drive onto your bookmark.com folder. The site claims there is no upper limit on the number of images or their size. I have not stress-tested the system, so I cannot comment on the actual limits if any.
Concluding remarks
Bookmark is largely catered towards web designers and agencies who want to use the white label service for their clients. But the ease of creating a website using AIDA may make it an attractive option for the non-technically-inclined user. Pricing wise, it becomes quite expensive for the causal user beyond the $12 a month plan.
Brizy
Brizy is an interesting beast, and I mean it in a good way. This service can called as hybrid. It is a pagebuilder and a web host. In that sense, it falls under the "younger siblings" category. They also offer cloud hosting, which uses their custom page builder.
a. You can download the .zip file that has the readymade site, simply upload it on your server, unpack it, and you are good to go. This is a great option if you are not planning to update the site regularly. That is, you are looking to create a static site. This is the "Export HTML" option.
b. The other option is to use your website as a 'front' face, but the page creation, image hosting, etc. happens from brizy. You can update the pages or the data on the webpages, and the content will be sync'ed dynamically with your website. This is the "Server Sync" Option.
The other two options- allow you to host on Brizy using your own custom domain, or use a subdomain with a "subdomain.brizy.io" extension. This option is the default for the free tier. Brizy also offers aWordPress plugin, which we might cover in a subsequent part of this series.
You can read the page Publishing options for Brizy
for more details.
Pricing plans
Brizy has three pricing tiers: Free account, Pro Personal Plan, and Pro Studio Plan. The pricing is at the mid segment : US $ 49 / year for Personal Pro and $ 99 for Pro Studio.
Here is the interesting part: under the free account, you can link 1 custom domain or sub domain. That is, you get one website hosted for free.
Similarly, under the Pro Personal Plan, you can link upto 3 custom domains or subdomains. In the Pro Studio plan there is no upper limit.You can visit the pricing page on their website for details.
Click to see the test site
SSL
Both Custom Domain and Brizy Subdomain publishing options come with free SSL included. According to their website, SSL "Takes up to 24 hours to be installed." In my experience, it DOES take 24 hours for the ssl to be set up.
CDN
Brizy has a list of POPs on their website, which they use for free and paid tiers. Particularly under the paid plan, the CDN locations in Asia Pacific region is quite extensive. This makes it an attractive proposition.
Hosting is on amazon EC2, image processing by Fastly, and their CDN provider may be a name familiar to most readers in the ES community: BunnyCDN.
Overall, they seem to have chosen some good Infrastructure providers, which means that eh performance is expected to be above par. One concern I have about such services is the price they have to pay to the providers. Amazon' s AWS in particular can get expensive. This aspect is best illustrated int he below video.
Video: AWS fees can quickly turn expensive!
Further reading:
1. Basic and Global CDN for Brizy
2. Specifications for cloud hosting
Brizy Cloud
I really like this option. For this review, I have included a video made from screen captures.I created a test site on Brizy cloud, and hosted it on the shared hosting site. I thought this was a good way to put to use the Black Friday offer from 2019 by Gullo's Hosting.
Watch the video
https://gaathastory.hippovideo.io/video/play/idjtxkG6bFT3nJxJKbfNUcFlmwywclicW25lWKIwLk0
Summing it all up
I really like Brizy and the simplicity and options it offers. In particular, you can create a rather complex page (or series of pages) and publish them in a variety of ways. This product is under active development. On the flip side, there are bugs, and the Wordpress plugin had a security incident a couple of months ago. Brizy is worth a try- heck, they offer free of 1 website.
Conclusion: Part II
This wraps up part II of this 6 part series. Hope you found the Sitebuilder options discussed in this post useful. The list I have posted at the beginning of this article is by no means exhaustive. But I thought the best way to create value for the readers was by writing about services that I have used first hand. With that logic, I should have even covered Sitepad, but that is a post for another day. Hope you find the mini-reviews useful. As always, looking forward to your comments, feedback and recommendations if any.
blog | exploring visually |
@AnthonySmith
Some formatting not working in Vanilla.
E.g table of contents. I have therefore removed it. Also video player resolution is looking crappy in mobile view. I tried, but no avail yet. Needs some more digging around, else happy to post on Vimeo/YT and post link.
My learning: not all markdowns are created equal.
Third and final tag for the day
@Ympker
Some Interesting numbers: when I ran this post through SEO tool it gave the following details. As a coincidence, this post falls in the median. Stats of this post in the parenthesis.
Keywords: pagebuilder pagebuilders website design (used all of them)
Text length: 2024 - 2474 words (this post is at 2435 words)
SEO Title Length (max 65 symbols): 8 - 10 words (Title: 9 words)
H1 title length: 7 - 9 words (7 Words)
Description Length: 21 - 27 words (50 words)
Keyword density: 2% (1.8%)
blog | exploring visually |