No-Code Revolution

The No-Code revolution is here and I for one welcome our no-code overlords!

No-Code has tried to become a part of our lives and has been held back time and time again, but this time it’s here to stay. I remember using Dreamweaver and other pseudo WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools 20 years ago, but they were frowned upon as creating bloated code and slow-loading pages and were not something a coding purist would use.

Many technologies have been held back as they were seen as “non-enterprise”. PHP was a big “no-no” for a while, as it couldn’t scale… UNTIL Facebook made it scale. Then it was ok, and people started using it for enterprise applications.

The people telling you that you can’t do something had vested interests, and it usually came down to that person protecting their job and what they knew best. They didn’t want change, they wanted to keep getting paid for something they knew how to do. Well, it’s adapt or die and anyone that ever worked at Kodak will tell you that for free.

GRZZ is embracing the "No-Code" movement as we can see that's where the future is. Just like WordPress was a blogging tool that became a development framework, Squarespace and Webflow are just starting to gain that traction and acceptance as enterprise tools.

The issue in scaling is not in the software; it’s in the server architecture and using tools such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) now makes that part of it easy.

We have done so much work lately converting WordPress to Squarespace sites, as they are so much easier to update and use.

Figma is another kind of No-Code / Design tool that has been gaining a lot of attention lately. It makes creating prototypes super easy without a line of code, and deserves its reputation, although I’m not thrilled about the buyout by Adobe. Adobe makes great products, but their pricing structure and monopoly on design industry tools are not good for anyone (apart from Adobe).

Shopify used to be considered a "non-enterprise" tool until the likes of Frank Body and Who Gives a Crap started selling millions on it. Squarespace will do the same, eventually bringing out a Pro/Plus version just like Shopify did.

We plan on being there and ahead of the curve when that happens. Steep learning curves are hard, gradual learning curves are easy.

Which CMS should I use?

It can be a confusing choice, but it depends on your end goal. What are you trying to achieve? You don’t need a Ferarri if you only drive to church on Sundays, and a Toyota Camry won’t cut it in F1.

We have been using Squarespace a lot lately and it kind of started by accident, I never expected it to be such a capable tool - you can read more about how that happened here.

I can see a bright future in Squarespace, but it’s not suitable for all scenarios.

Creating forms on Squarespace is fiddly and not very good. That said, it is effortless to use a tool such as Hubspot and embed the form directly into Squarespace.

Squarespace doesn’t have a “Revision History” feature as WordPress does, so if you have a lot of users editing your site it’s not going to work well, and you’re in danger of losing content which is not much fun.

Squarespace is so much easier to use than WordPress though, it’s point and click and very easy to change things whilst still being limited to the site styles (fonts, colour palette), so you don’t need to worry if the intern prefers Purple Comic Sans.

WordPress or Squarespace?

A lot of the time it comes down to what you know and what you are familiar using and many people have grown up with WordPress and it’s quick and easy for them to update their site.

WordPress needs to be maintained regularly, WordPress code and Plug-ins which can take a lot of time. It also breaks. I would say 10% of the time when upgrading WordPress and Plugins something will break.

If you are just focusing on selling I would use Shopify. If you are a government agency or a publisher I would look at Drupal.

Having the right tool is important but it’s not everything. Coming from a music background I used to get stuck on what DAW I should be using, Logic or ProTools, or what are the best software synths and I would spend hours comparing them when in hindsight I should have spent more time just writing music.