| I've not used Nicepage before, but I have used the majority of WYSIWYG editors mentioned in this article. It's an exciting read for a designer like myself because I've been thinking about this problem for a while. The conclusion is fairly misleading because it's missing the glaringly obvious answer: designers could learn HTML and CSS. I fought it forever thinking that there will always be a WYSIWYG and they'll eventually get so good they'll spit out the code for me. The reality is much more frustrating. Adobe Muse was promising as it helped with responsive design and the free form creativity this article talks about, BUT it had a ton of issues. Relying on it for projects with clients was risky as one update would kill your production, as it often did. Reverting back a version was a solution so you could finish the project, but the features added to the update were crucial, and as a designer I wanted those too. Then it became a game of learn the software de jure, and hope it's A) good enough B) will have support for a long time C) isn't cheap, and D) doesn't take forever to learn. Eventually, I discovered grid and flex box and have been teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JS. Code isn't going away. Software does. Also, I don't trust any WYSIWYG editor to produce clean and concise code. I'm afraid it'll spit out a bunch of divs and be extremely inefficient. Not to mention accessibility and semantics. Even if designing to a grid and carefully watching my proportions and where items sit on or next to each other, I still fear the program will spit out some ugly code. Mainly, when using a WYSIWYG, it ends up taking just as long as it would to code, especially if you want it to look really good. So now, my goal is design like the Web 3.0 described in this article, but with the good old tools with which I have full control. It's like a carpenter in his wood shop, as opposed to using a combination of legos and Ikea. No matter what, to have ultimate control is the best, and it remains to be seen if Nicepage or any design tool will ever be as good as the most fundamental of tools (code). I suppose the reality is there's a huge spectrum of designers. There's the developer oriented ones, which resources are aplenty. Then on the other end of the spectrum are artists, who need a blank canvas to fill out their ideas. One is quick and good enough, the other long and the end result likely janky behind the curtain. Nicepage seems to want to appeal to the the artist. With enough time, a true designer can understand the full spectrum and see that fully custom coded websites, even if they take a long time, are still likely to be the most unique and longest lasting. |
For the most part people who are like this should be doing a different specialty related to design (graphic design, branding, tv, print...). Web design for the most part is taking a lot of data and fitting it into a limited space that changes based on the user's preferences and device.
And you are right the simplest solution is to just learn to write code. Once you get a good setup going it's less painful than using the pallets in photoshop and you'll have a hell of a lot more control and flexibility. I think people get intimidated because when they think of code they think you'll need a lot of math and arcane knowledge. CSS is a much different thing that often makes more sense to designers than it does to developers.