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If we start picking the least popular pin codes they'll stop being the least popular. What a tragedy

Hey, founder of Easyblocks here!

The idea behind Easyblocks is quite simple. Today if you want to create a custom text editor for your product you have a lot of options with different abstraction levels: Slate, Lexical, CKEditor, TineMCE etc. But if you want to create a custom PAGE BUILDER there's not much to pick from. There are GrapeJS or WebStudio, but they're based on HTML/CSS (there's a HTML nodes panel on the left and CSS properties panel on the right), which is too hard for most people. There's no abstraction over the HTML/CSS that would make the experience simple and foolproof.

Easyblocks architecture is based on a novel concept called No-Code Components. I personally find it fascinating. No-Code Components are defined with code but are also visually editable. Each No-Code Component can have CUSTOM styling properties which makes it both visually flexible and not overwhelming for end-users (no CSS overhead). It's as if you could build your own visual blocks with Squarespace-level simplicity. You can build the most custom logic out there and yet leave the user with something super simple to use and customised.

Btw, it all started with Shopstory - a visual page builder for headless CMSes (https://www.shopstory.app/). We had a moderate success with it but during the journey we got asked by multiple software vendors if they could use Shopstory INSIDE of their products. Since we had quite an advanced editor and architecture behind Shopstory we thought that we should make it public for everyone.

High five!

Headless means that you're using e-commerce platform only via API and build your front-end in whatever tech you want (next, nuxt, Remix, etc). It's different from a traditional approach when e-commerce platform handles front-end (HTML templates rendering). In Shopify can do both.

https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/headless-commerce

You can design iPhones. Or you can design installation art.

Most of "best websites" directories are for "installation art". Not usable, money-making design. It's art for artists.

But to be fair, we developers often do the same thing. We get too excited about dev-only things that don't always have much business value.

In e-commerce space you might take a look at: https://theheadlessclub.com/. It's exactly what you're looking for. Quote from about page:

"Most directories tend to put emphasis on shiny and showy hyper-animated web experiments. Unfortunately, many of these projects fail when criteria like performance, mobile, usability, and accessibility are considered. It’s hard to find one single resource on the internet that would combine both the technological excellence and highly polished design in ecommerce space. The Headless Club started as an internal agency tool to foster ecommerce best-practices across our development team. Now we’re sharing our findings with you."

Disclaimer: I'm the co-author (with folks from commerce-ui.com agency). We'll soon make it not specific to headless but to all e-commerce stores.

Hello, founder and CTO of www.shopstory.app here. None if these arguments apply if you build page builder right. I believe we're on the right path.

First, it works inside of headless CMSes. It means that you get all advantages of structured content and yet add sprinkles of unstructured content when you need on top of that. You can always connect structured data into visual blocks built with Shopstory.

As for design consistency we build everything around design tokens. Not only fonts and colors but also page margins, grid gaps etc. Also, you will soon have permission system where designers can build templates but editors can't modify visual properties.

The bottom line is that I believe in the future we won't need to make a tradeoff between visual vs structured. You can have both at the same time and just fine tune the system to whatever direction suits you better.

> Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media.

True, but print media formats got even more simplified in web. The reason? Responsiveness constraints.

Many times I've seen great advanced "article-like" designs for desktop from ambitious designers. It turned out that making them easy to manage in CMS, stable in all possible combinations (or implementing good validators) and at the same time logical and good looking on mobile was extremely hard and not worth it.

This led to further simplifications...

... and then Medium looks like Medium.

There's not much place for creativity on mobile. And this is where most of the "fast content" is read.

"Somewhere between $20m and $100m ARR,

All marketing sites converge on an identical design"

https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152

Thank you!

Design != Art !!!

If designer is more interested in fulfilling his artistic/creative ambitions than business value for client (making things great looking, stable and reasonably easy to implement -> in budget), he shouldn't even touch digital today. It's too complex and filled with too many constraints.

But if same designer wants to make decent money, well...

True.

A while ago most people didn't realise to what extend loading times affect engagement.

If they knew, flash would be dead much quicker.

Menu on the bottom is obviously pointless, but sticky menu on the bottom would be so cool, most of the mobile apps moved to tabbar.

Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring).

On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention.

Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.

I run a front-end agency that specializes in helping top-league branding agencies and designers code their websites.

Designers try to make sth fresh and out of the box all the time. The problem with these solutions are:

1. UX sucks

2. Don't scale to other resolutions (especially mobile / tablet).

3. EXTREMELY expensive to code comparing to "boring" web solutions (multipliers might be as big as 5-10x)

So most of the work we do is to try to make designers think with patterns ("boring" but the only way to fit in budget) and try to get as much as they can from STATIC design. Play with typography, key visuals, content etc. This is where their work brings most value for reasonable money.

The author of the article is a professor, so wouldn't expect realistic business thinking from him. He might be sad because web is boring, but usually no one wants to spend huge amount of money for prototypes where there's 95% probability that UX and stability will be worse than standard.

And there's a HUGE value in familiarity for users. That's why most of "creative projects" end up looking pretty similar at the end. I've seen many e-commerce sites which had "fancy design" and after months/years ended up with standard e-comm layout.

Also, web today is super hard comparing to 10 years ago. Number of things to think about multiplied by A LOT. Coding great static website with all things stable and looking great is a big task already.

It's like asking for a car with steering wheel in the back or with 3 wheels and paying for it 5x more. Do you want one?

EDIT:

Not saying "creative projects" are bad or sth, they sometimes are super coool. But I treat them more like "web art installation". Nice if you like them but not really practical.