[trcollinson]

The problem I have with it, and I would imagine a good percentage of people who frequent Hacker News, is that I know how to build websites, and Wix, Squarespace, etc. just slow me down more than speed me up. Some of this may be psychological. But I feel like no matter what was built, this would be the case.

For example, my son was required to use one of these builders to make a site for his English class over the weekend. He wanted to connect up a simple link in the homepage to an about me page. Simple, in a static website this would be an <a> with appropriate href and such. But with a site builder you had to know which box to go to. You had to have already made the about me page so that the site builder knew how to link up. Etc etc etc. A task that takes me 3 seconds took 10 minutes.

Additionally, as someone who works for companies for a living, I get calls from potential clients that say "I want my Squarespace to do X, Y, and Z, and Squarespace doesn't let me do it. Can you make it do it?" Well, no. I can build you a site that does that, but I can't make Squarespace do something it doesn't do.

These site builders aren't bad at all. Non-technical people use them successfully all of the time. But I am definitely not your target audience.

[mebr]

Thank you for the insightful comment. I'm not sure you're not my target audience. In summary I gather you find the extremely rigid system of these builder inconvenient. I guess you had to consult the docs to figure our how to create that link for your son, and a good chunk of that 10 minutes was spent on this. Am I correct?

I'm thinking if my builder can make a software engineer build website quicker with a high level of abstraction that's exclusively mutual with others being able to do so. I've been researching intuitive interfaces, as my hypothesis is that the interface is the bottleneck. Thank you again for your comment, it is helpful!