[migueloller]

I don't think you're being absolutist or cranky at all. I think there's valid reasons why you would want to export your site.

I guess the reason we call ourselves a "website builder" is because Makeswift lets you build, well, websites. As for "presentations that can be displayed on the web", it's a bit more powerful than that. All components use to build Makeswift sites are React components and we are planning on opening that up so that third-party developers can create components any Makeswift user could drop in to their website.

As for lock-in, again, I think you make a fair point. In the long term we will probably have a self-hosting solution but it's something we're not focusing on at the moment. Most of our customers just want to focus on designing a website and then clicking a few buttons to have it live.

Thanks so much for your feedback :)

[lhorie]

I'm reading through the first half of the article, which mostly tells some story about how a pain point might turn out, but I don't feel like that's really answering the "why _another_ website builder".

To really address that question, one needs to address the elephant in the room: wordpress. Thanks to over a decade head start, it's arguably the most advanced solution in the space. Wordpress and its ecosystem handle a myriad of business-focused things that make most attempts at React-based solutions look like toys. There are power user templates that let you configure pretty much every aspect of the site and then some, and if you want to defer, you can also find wordpress experts very very easily.

[robertlagrant]

> All components use to build Makeswift sites are React components and we are planning on opening that up so that third-party developers can create components any Makeswift user could drop in to their website

I'm being a bit facetious, but why would you need this if marketers can control everything already? :-)

[migueloller]

Hah, all good. We give them _visual_ control of everything. But say you wanted to make a component that pull the last 10 tweets from an account or a Stripe Checkout button or some other custom component, then you can.

Any React component is already a Makeswift component, the question is, how do you get the props? Well we've got a whole bunch of what we call prop controllers for basic stuff like numbers, colors, images, padding, margin, etc. You can also make your own. For example, in the Twitter feed component, you might make a panel that lets you search for tweets and then once you pick the account it passes the Twitter username to the component as a prop. The component can then fetch the tweets using the Twitter API, etc.

We have plans to open source all of our components as a reference for third-party developers building their own custom Makeswift components. Also, if you're a company that already has an internal design system built in React, your marketing team can just drop those in to your Makeswift site (constrained by the props the developers decide to expose).

This is all internal right now, though. I can't wait until we can release this API to the public, haha.

[vagrantJin]

Dumb question. Does React matter in using the service - like an advantage of something like wordpress or shopify?

[migueloller]

It will give us the opportunity to let developers build their own components, allow us to use frameworks like Next.js to power our users' sites, and let us leverage the ecosystem to build cool components and integrations. So as far as the end-user is concerned this should result in better performance, more options for components, and easier extensibility if they are developers.

[escape_goat]

This might be a sticking point to adopting your service for some stakeholders, not so much because they actually need to export the website anywhere but because the business model of so many website builders seems to be 'regret'.

[LordAtlas]

Yeah, that's a no from me, dawg.