[crop_rotation]

I think the article misses the point that people just want to get things done. Particularly this point is so naive:

> using a page builder doesn’t make you a developer.

People who are using page builders are not doing to pass the arbitrary qualifications of being a developer. They just want to get something done and getting a developer to create a performant page is just so much more expensive. Even within big companies some departments leverage these because getting developer bandwidth is just too expensive for most of these use cases.

[camillomiller]

It’s a wrong assumption and a marketing trick of all major page builders. For a one-person business, sure thing, maybe go with it. For all other use cases they are a liability, and a time consuming effort by people that shouldn’t be spending their (precious) time building a website for the first time.

As a web designer / FE developer and wordpress developer, I am happy they exist because they’re great business. The client starts with one template picked at random based on the wrong assumption that what you see in the frontend is tied to the template, two months in they realize that the marketing claims of Elementor or Divi or whatev where BS, and get frustrated about the unholy mess they’ve made. That’s when I get usually called in - mostly via word of mouth - to “fix the mess”. What I usually do is guide the client through why having a custom theme with flexible repeatable components is a much better idea. Then we sit down and we make a complete content outline to better structure what they’ve been scattering around the site in different pages with no separation of concerns between content, structure and graphic design (99% of the time this is really the problem they didn’t know they needed to solve first!). After that, I get to refactor the site into a lean, SEO-friendly structure, and finally I can sell them a small retainer for maintenance, because they finally understood that two hours of their time are worth MORE than a few hundred dollars they pay to a professional to keep the machine humming

So I guess yeah, thanks DIVI and Elementor?

[mewpmewp2]

Yet there are countless of business and small businesses who were able to leverage just from page builders and spin up their business viably and cheaply.

[tannhaeuser]

> Getting to know page builder doesn’t make you a developer (leave the job to a professional).

Not only is it naive but based on the sad, self-centric failure to understand the original purpose of the web as a means for publishing hypertext.

[nonethewiser]

That makes it sound completely naive but I think that conclusion would be too rash. it seems like the author has some audience in mind. Perhaps himself after trying a page builder.

[rchaud]

It seems to me that this part of the article is a swipe at young people using page builders to create websites in hopes of passing themselves off as a developer.