Here’s another post, specifically on CMS/website builders! In case it isn’t already obvious, i use my blog a lot to build a list of tools in specific categories for me to also utilize in the future. Here is the list of website builders that I have encountered and potentially used. You can of course build a website using just pure bespoke codes. However often than not you will need the ability for non-tech people to maintain your site’s content, as well as visual elements of the site, or even the entire site. Hence a category of products exists for this

Wordpress

Wordpress is originally a blog engine, however due to the flexibility of extending it with plugins and customizable themes, it has been very well used, even up till today. It is relatively low cost to deploy or to get a hosted service that provides wordpress. This is a first choice for a hobbyist type project, but it isn’t going to be my first choice for businesses

DotNetNuke/Umbraco

Given my history with .NET, I have been looking at quite a number of CMSes built on top of .NET itself. Surprisingly this 2 products still exist in the market today. Both of these have very different paradigms each on how they approach solving content management. The only reason why I put them together is because I haven’t really used them in a while and I don’t really know if things have significantly changed since

Webflow

Used this in past projects - historically we have a workflow where our designer would just build in Webflow, then export it into codes, which we imported it into an AngularJS project. It was a small team so it worked well. And what is quite powerful was also the ability to use the designer to create simple animations

Builder.io/Plasmic

This is in some sense a new category. It is very subtle, but it unlocks few possibilities as to how you think about a CMS. Generally speaking, a CMS was always built as a standalone product. Builder.io and plasmic “inverted” the entire model by allowing you to integrate a CMS into your existing bespoke site. One use case here is that you have a “marketing site” and you also have a web app. Typically integration between both would be difficult. However since this exists as a library/component within your web app, you can now have a single site that allows your marketing team to maintain using a code free editor, and your web developers to build your bespoke web product

Jekyll

Jekyll is one type of static site builders of many out there. I chose this because I am using it, and it is what is natively supported by GitHub if you want a static site builder. It isn’t really a CMS per say but it is pretty powerful given the content itself is managed within a git repository, which automatically give you version control

Squarespace/Wix/Shopify

Following the principals of YAGNI (you aren’t gonna need it). Squarespace, Wix and Shopify fits squarely into the categories of very simple, cookie cutter, templated websites. Speaking from experience, sometimes it’s better not to overthink your challenges and focus on the outcomes. While it does not offer flexibility, it definitely offers a lot of speed and ease of use. Most of the time, simple is enough