[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.