[jmconfuzeus]

Not just Git, marketing people also hate headless CMSes because they're hard to use and make it more complicated to try new things out. You have to use different tools to build forms, pages, and track users. Even as a developer I think it's a nightmare.

They best way to build a website is by using something like Elementor or Webflow so that engineers can spend time building useful things instead of reinventing the wheel.

Block based CMSes like Wagtail are also very good because unlike page builders, you get good performance. Of course, there will be additional development costs.

In the end, it's very important to not require development time for every little experiment your marketing team needs to carry out and with Jamstack you always need to bother your developer when you need to make a change.

[PinkPigeon]

Well, funnily enough, I have also found existing site builders to be insufficient in various ways.

Firstly, I do not believe that the block-based approach works that well. It sounds great on paper, to be able to drag and drop block-like elements to compose a page, but it falls apart so quickly. You just don't end up with coherent pages, especially once everything starts getting rearranged on mobile.

Speaking of mobile, try using one of those drag and drop based editors on a mobile phone.

Plus, performance is usually terrible and getting your preview can also take a while. Not sure if they do shareable preview pages nowadays.

I build a CMS for static pages (not sure it's considered jamstack?) addressing all of the above, which deploys straight to Cloudflare, handles your forms and is based on modules, not blocks. Everything is a module, basically. This has allowed us to create sites that are properly responsive AND a CMS that works properly on smartphones. The tricky part is competing in a market where everyone thinks Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace are the last word spoken (when that couldn't be further from the truth, there is so much to be improved upon). We're also competing on price, depending on what features users need.

Don't know if anyone here is interested in trying it, but if you hit me up, I'll sort you out with a discount.

[jmconfuzeus]

Sounds like you built something for yourself instead of building something that the market wants.

Every non technical person I've spoken with loves Wordpress and Squarespace for good reason.

[PinkPigeon]

> Sounds like you built something for yourself

Absolutely! That appears to be how all of my projects start. If I have a need for something, I'll go build it for myself. That way I am ensuring I am using my own product, which I find vital.

> instead of building something that the market wants.

I don't quite have that information yet. So far, reactions seem positive, but the jury is out on whether it'll work. I'm only about a month in, but I felt it's worth giving it a shot and seeing if there are others who want the same features I've built. I am not planning to even show up on Wordpress' or Squarespace's radar. Their user figures are in the millions. If I, by some stroke of luck and opportunity, ended up with a few hundred, maybe a thousand users, I'd consider this thing hugely successful.

> Every non technical person I've spoken with loves Wordpress and Squarespace for good reason.

This is super relevant, could you let me know how many people and what sort of level of technical knowledge? You mention 'for good reason', which would also be most interesting to hear more about. What sort of reasons?

I have found Wordpress and Squarespace to be good products. Squarespace much more so, especially for less-technical people. I find that setting up a Wordpress instance, even in this day and age is an extremely varied experience (from 1-click providers all the way to installing your own SQL DB and whatnot). But I have also found that you run into certain limitations quite quickly. Themes can be oddly restrictive. Changing your mind about something substantial on your site can quickly become an issue. At the same time, my product has other limitations, so it's obviously about what you think you need as a user. I'd wager that if you took someone properly non-technical and set them in front of our CMS vs. the Wordpress site builder (or even a site pre-built in either CMS), ours would be more intuitive to use. But I am still doing that research and while my sample size is growing, I wouldn't with confidence declare my product easier to use.

Edit: I feel documentation is another pretty big area where things quickly get confusing for users of the other providers' systems. I'm really trying to build a kind of documentation that encompasses the whole system and makes it very clear how to use every part of it. With something as complex as Wordpress that's nearly impossible to do, as Wordpress can be as complex as you like it to be. That's obviously one of its strengths: Even a dev can use it and not feel hindered by it. My product, on the flipside, does not cater to devs whatsoever.

[_fat_santa]

> Not just Git, marketing people also hate headless CMSes because they're hard to use and make it more complicated to try new things out. You have to use different tools to build forms, pages, and track users. Even as a developer I think it's a nightmare.

I strongly disagree. IMO a headless CMS is perfect because it provides a good seperation of concerns. Marketing people want to adjust taglines and tweak text, add tags and do that sort of stuff, they don't want to spend their time building interfaces. Developers want to build interfaces but don't really care to spend their time figuring out the perfect tagline or adjusting verbiage on a landing page.

With a headless CMS I can focus on creating the page, hook it up to my CMS, and then message the marketing person that the page is ready for them to add data to it.

[jmconfuzeus]

They don't want to build the whole interface but they sure want to move things around and try out pages with different layouts.

The goal is to allow them to ship marketing experiments as quickly as possible. With Jamstack, they always have to wait on the developer.

The only people who enjoy Jamstack are developers themselves because it's a cool toy to play with. I used to like playing around with Gatsby and Contentful 3 years ago. Then I decided that businesses need to make money and I can't be doing what I find fun to use at the detriment of the ecosystem.

[akie]

Preach.