A Journey through No-code: From Wordpress to Framer

I’ve always been intrigued by technology from the early days of playing Atari and playing text games on DOS. It’s one of my bigger regrets that I didn’t pursue computer science in college but nevertheless, I’m back to my first love and trying to make up for lost time.

Setting up a website using Wordpress

I first started using Wordpress in 2006 or so when I wanted to set up a webcomic. I spent hours trying to figure out how to set up Wordpress locally and could not get it to work for weeks. When my mother wanted to set up a food blog, I ended up choosing Weebly because it seemed like the easier option at the time.

Over the years, I finally figured out how to host Wordpress and build simple status websites. I bought and customized themes that I like until I stumbled upon Avada and really liked the flexibility that Fusion Builder offered. Avada was also consistently adding new, high-quality themes which I would find straightforward to customise to my needs. I built several websites using Avada over the years. However, I would always run into errors that would take the site down and I’d spend hours troubleshooting before handing it over to someone on Upwork to fix.

Even so, things still felt unstable, especially when it came to updating either Wordpress or Avada or any of the plugins used. I found making even small changes such as to individual components very tedious. Furthermore, with each update, both Avada and Wordpress felt less intuitive, and just to be honest, I never liked the interface.

The upside with Wordpress is that once you get over the initial cost of a theme, for eg. Avada is $100 per website, and the costs of running your host which can be quite minimal on a yearly basis (you can run many sites on one host), Wordpress then feels almost free. Your site can run for years without any additional costs. Wordpress is also an open-source tool and since a majority of websites on the internet today run on Wordpress, there’s a large community and tons of resources on setting up and troubleshooting Wordpress.

I’ve usually only built static websites, esp. for informational purposes, so Wordpress had been fine but I wanted to move on to more interactive websites such as dashboards, forums or marketplaces and by 2022, I just felt very weary of Wordpress. The thought of setting up another Wordpress website felt a bit depressing. I started to look for alternatives.

Enter Bubble for no-coding SAAS

After a disappointing experience with a developer, I decided to research no-code tools to develop a responsive web app. I stumbled upon Bubble.io. Bubble is a no-code visual development platform and an application platform as a service that enables non-technical people to build web applications without needing to type code. The usual way I like to learn is through just tinkering and figuring as I go. I realized early on that this was absolutely not going to work for Bubble. Nothing felt intuitive. Playing around on the platform led to nowhere. I even tried buying a few themes and learning from there but that was even more frustrating. I knew I had to go through a course to figure it out, and luckily together with the great online resources from BuildCamp, I was able to make significant progress and the possibilities for building on Bubble felt massive and limitless.

I would overall say that Bubble has a steep learning curve and because it’s such a powerful platform, the volume of things to learn feels very high. The Bubble forum is extremely helpful and so is the general community. 

Many activities on Bubble can feel repetitive, the platform can often be unresponsive and needs refreshing, dealing with responsiveness across screen sizes is sometimes nightmarish and I can’t say that it’s the most beautiful UI. Nevertheless, if you’re willing to put in the work, it’s really amazing what’s possible. I had read online that there are SEO issues with Bubble but I was able to rank in the top 10 within 2-3 months, so perhaps that’s not an issue any longer.

Building Beautiful Websites with Webflow

I had seen many beautiful sites built on Webflow with beautiful animations and decided to give it a try to create a static report website. I bought a theme that I liked and was able to customize it over a few days. I watched one or two hour long tutorials and felt like I was empowered enough to get going. I struggled again with some responsiveness issues as I had a combination of images and large volumes of text, which I feel could be an issue on any platform, but after some tinkering, I was able to make that section look presentable. The UI was simple enough to understand and it was straightforward to take the website live as well or to make any updates. 

Moving Quickly with Framer

Someone on Twitter had posted a speed test on their Bubble site and my Bubble site was indeed quite slow. They recommended building the landing page on Framer and the rest of the application on Bubble. At the same time, I needed to re-do my personal website due to a career transition and decided to try Framer for a change. I absolutely loved it and have been satisfied with migrating from Wordpress to Framer. The UI/UX is quite similar to Webflow. I watched 1-2 tutorials on Framer, but most things felt quite intuitive. Since Framer is still relatively new, the forums/community are not as well developed and I often found that there were no resources for the questions that I had. However, with Framer, it’s easy to try different tweaks until you get to where you need to be and learn what needs to happen to get what you’re looking for. I built my personal website in 2 days, then re-built my company website over a week and then built this blog in 2 hours. The platform is clean, minimal and and easy to use. There are many very beautiful templates available for free or for purchase at low costs as well as different components available to jazz up your site. Publishing on a custom domain is very straightforward and the pricing is less than Webflow at the point of writing this blog post.

Landing page on Bubble

Landing page on Framer

What's next?

The next platforms to test out on my list are WeWeb, WebStudio and Noodl. I’ll be back with an update after I give it a go. For now, let me know what else you would like to see on the blog or just say hi!