WebStudio: Open visual development for the open web
I&#x27;m gonna start copy&#x2F;pasting this every time I see a new website builder pop up.<p>Look, at a high level no-code seems to make sense. But there&#x27;s a serious issue with the value proposition when you start thinking critically about it. The supposed benefit is that, as the &quot;no-code&quot; moniker suggests, people without coding skills can build websites. Sounds great!<p>Except that just, like, look at the screenshot in the hero section webstudio&#x27;s landing page. There&#x27;s a visual sidebar with a flexbox configuration panel. The word &quot;flex&quot; is displayed as a dropdown, so I&#x27;d imagine that the menu list contains other options like &quot;grid&quot;, &quot;block&quot;, etc.<p>This means your target audience is people who (a) understand the difference between CSS display properties, and (b) think that this interface is easier and faster than writing the code directly. I genuinely do not understand who this audience is - if you understand code, code is <i>dramatically</i> faster than any UI and everyone who codes knows it.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with a non-technical CEO, and I once showed him Webflow to see if he could grasp it. It went as well as you&#x27;d imagine. That&#x27;s not me making fun of him, it&#x27;s me pointing out the reality that this shit is <i>complex</i>, and tossing a UI on top of it doesn&#x27;t change that complexity.<p>Another point is that even if it helps speed up web development, it can only do so for very small websites with light interaction. If you&#x27;re looking to do anything even remotely custom or sophisticated, these kinds of tools break down very fast. So there&#x27;s a paradox here - the stuff you can speed up really doesn&#x27;t take very long anyways, and the stuff you actually need to speed up, these tools don&#x27;t help with.