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First things first: what you should expect from my posts. I try to learn about, write about, and do things that interest me. That might not seem overly novel, but it might save you some time in trying to figure out why I seem to approach some things in a strange manner or effortlessly make simple tasks overly complicated. Simply put, it’s probably interesting for me. It also means that I often tend to do things the hard way. Not because I’m a glutton for punishment, or because I’m one of those people that take cold showers so I’m grateful for the hot ones, but because I often find the hard way interesting.
Secondly, why did I build this website? The building of this site isn’t a means to a blogging empire (although I guess that would be cool), but rather the end in itself. The primary reason I built this site, and will continue iterating and building, is because I want to be able to learn how to build websites.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve tried building a personal website before. ANDDDDD this is how it went:
This was my first attempt back in 2013. I was in my second year of an 11 year stint at EatStreet, a Midwestern food delivery company. I don’t remember the exact genesis of this atrocity, but I remember being jealous of how our designers could just…....turn an idea into something tangible. So I decided I was going to learn HTML and CSS and build my own website from the ground up and I was going to do it in a weekend. That obviously wasn’t realistic and because of my lack of progress, it wasn’t long before my URL of choice turned into this:
So now, 9 years later, what’s different? For starters, I’m 9 years older. While I’d never claim to be the most disciplined individual in the world, it doesn’t take alot to be more disciplined than my 22 year old self. But probably the biggest difference is, I’ve gained quite a bit of experience in no-code development. If you’re interested in learning more about no-code, Webflow (which ended up being my platform of choice) has a great article on this.
My background in no-code started with and primarily has come from Salesforce: a platform I self-implemented, administered, and developed on for 8+ years while at EatStreet. Admittedly, when I first started working on the platform, I didn’t consider what I was doing to be development.
However, as time went on I found myself having better conversations with our development team. I was finding that at the root of it, what we were doing wasn’t so different. We just happened to be using very different methodologies. I later had to learn a new no-code development program called Appsheet for a project I was working on for work. While it had its own nuances, I found it similar to learning how to ride a road bike when you’ve only ridden a mountain bike your whole life. Yes, the gears might be slightly different and maybe the handle bars bend down instead of sticking out on the sides, but at the end of the day, it’s still a bike.
These experiences led me down the route of building my personal site using one of these no-code platforms. I just had to find the right one. I’m not gonna lie. My research is hardly first hand. I relied heavily on other people’s blog articles, youtube videos, and online tutorials. However, I often find this to be a great way to learn about the strengths of platforms, but often even better, their hidden pitfalls. I’ll highlight a few platforms that I considered for building my website.
When doing my research on no-code development platforms, Bubble kept coming up. I think for good reason. They’ve been around since 2012 and have been one of the mainstays in this space over the years. Not only are they a front end development platform, but they are also a full stack development platform. What this means is rather than having to go out and find a CMS to power your content for your blog posts, you can utilize Bubble’s backend.
Admittedly, the headline on their website had me at hello. They claim to be the first professional no-code development platform. A platform where choosing to go no-code wouldn’t mean making compromises. This really resonated with me because I found myself constantly toiling over when to finally take the plunge and become a full blown, traditional developer. Perhaps if I used this platform, I wouldn’t have to? I’d also be able to build a single app that would work on web, iOS, Android, Apple TV, and Google TV. Now, I didn’t expect that people would be downloading my personal site to view on their Apple TV, but this seemed like a potentially awesome platform to learn. But if it sounds too good to be true, is it?
This definitely came across as one of the most polished no-code platforms I came across. Which makes senses considering they recently raised a round of funding at over a $4 Billion valuation. They tout brands such as Zendesk, Dell, and other enterprise companies as clients. They appeared to have a pretty amazing community and help resources.
Ok, so now that I’ve covered the different platforms I evaluated. Let me run through my thought process of how I chose a winner. There were a few pieces of criteria that were absolute musts for me.
- The platform has to be able to create a website. This is important because a lot of the no-code platforms are designed to build apps. There are a lot of really cool no-code platforms that weren’t a good fit for my site because of this, but I’ll be diving into more at a later date.
- I wanted portability for my code in case I chose to leave the platform. This probably isn’t that big of a deal for a single site, but if I chose to make more sites in the future I didn’t want to be arbitrarily tied to the platform. Imagine a world where you built 15 websites on a platform that charges $30/month/site and one day they decide to double their price to $60/month/site. If you’re locked in, you have to balance switching costs with the increase in subscription. If you are able to download the source code, you can at least move to hosting the sites yourself.
So going down the list, I considered Bubble.io for quite awhile. There’s a lot to love in this platform, but I couldn’t get over the lack of portability. Because of this, Bubble was out. This left me with Appgyver and Webflow. They both allow you to download your source code and take it with you to another platform. Webflow seemed like the safer choice. They were more of a known commodity. On the other hand, Appgyver seemed to be a growing platform that would offer possibilities well beyond building a personal website.
Considering you’re reading this post on my website built on Webflow, my decision may seem anti-climatic.
So naturally I chose…
Appgyver.
If you remember, I said at the start of this post that this website, built with Webflow, is actually my third attempt at a personal site. Appgyver was recently my second attempt. I’m not gonna lie. I really like Appgyver. It did live up to a lot of its self proclaimed hype.
So what went wrong?
For starters, Appgyver is primarily designed to build applications and not static sites. My experience thus far has been that they lack many features that one has come to expect from a website builder. A few examples:
You’re unable to set custom page names for your URLs. I think this is because their focus is on building apps where your page names are not visible. Perhaps not the biggest deal, but it does drive me insane to see URLs that look like this:
SEO for the sites you build is virtually non-existent. There is nothing built into the platform to make sure you’re using best practices. This was a major feature I overlooked when deciding on a platform. I’ve come across a few posts on their forums where people have asked about this functionality and their staff has relayed that it’s not a focus of theirs.
Because of this, I ended up making the switch to Webflow. To be fully transparent, this time I didn’t do things the hard way. This site is actually built using a template I purchased from Medium Rare. I do plan on creating my own design at a later date but I was finding myself in a catch-22 where I’ve wanted to share my journey, but I haven’t had a platform to do so. Perhaps by the time you’re reading this, you’re actually on my 4th site. The one I built myself.
