Need input on software for landing page builders

Hi all!

I'm working on a personal project, and need some outside input on software for building landing pages. I just have a few questions that I'd like to ask about what you are looking for in a builder software. I'm not trying to sell anything... just looking for some outside opinions:

1. What software(s) have you used?
2. What did you like about them?
3. What did you not like about them?
4. What would you say are your "Top 5" must-have features for a builder?

Any and all responses will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Zach

 

First, how are you defining the "landing page"? Like a "splash page"? How is it different from just any page the visitor might arrive at?

That's simple, a plain text editor (Emacs) and an image manipulation suite (ImageMagick [IM] or rarely, GIMP).

Emacs? Simple, it is probably the senior editor extant. It is mature with continuing development and an active user/developer community. It and Vi represent the two basic editor memes. Nearly all feature common to most editors today come from Emacs, e.g. tabbed buffers (implicit, not visible, space stealing representations) and tiled buffers. Emacs in *nix environments had a graphical UI before MSFT or Apple even had graphic UIs. There are about 3,000 extensions available for auto-install over and above the standard complement which is pretty damned comprehensive, and that doesn't count the modifications you can write yourself. I also like that I can do everything I want form the keyboard, including running outside applications.

IM is a cli suite of tools for manipulating and creating images. I'm not a graphics guy, but for the web, various alterations are necessary and IM is simple to use. For example, to resize an image to fit a 'box':

convert some.gif    -resize 64x64  resize_some.gif

Code (markup):

is a bunch easier than using GIMP or PS.

I am perfectly happy with Emacs. There are those who complain, citing a steep learning curve. Bulsh. It is no more difficult to learn to use Emacs than any other editor. Those people look at the capabilities and swoon like a Victorian maiden. You only need to learn the basics, then you can learn those key-bindings that are most useful to whatever you're doing. Remember that MSWord has 250 key-bindings, does that put you off?

There is no compelling reason to jack with a 'builder'.

gary

 

Hi Gary,

Thanks for your response! By "landing page" I am referring to any page a visitor might land on after clicking a search result. I guess I should also clarify my intent a bit. My project has to do with identifying needs for a yet-to-be-designed builder that can be used by people with little or no working knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. Pretty much, non-technical people that want to create webpages, then draw attention to their websites and ultimately turn them into leads. I get that you don't like builders, but this is the direction I must go

 

Your def of landing page is the same as mine, that is, J. Random Page.

From your more detailed description of your project, I have to ask how you expect to set your project as improved on Dreamweaver? What will separate yours from people throwing themes and plug-ins at a WordPress platform?

gary

 

Hi Gary,

Right now, I'm pretty much just in an information-gathering phase to see what problems I could solve to ultimately build something that could compete with the likes of Dreamweaver. I guess I could/should re-frame my question as: Given the following, what are the biggest problems companies or individuals are trying to solve?

• They want to:
  • build a website
  • generate traffic to that website
  • analyze visits and page clicks
  • convert into leads
• They have the following constraints/concerns:
  • little or no technical knowledge
  • modest budget

I understand there are many tools out there (i.e. Dreamweaver) that help users do this, I'm just trying to get a glimpse into what it is that people are looking for when searching for similar tools, and what prompts the search in the first place.

 

In other words crap that wouldn't know semantics or accessibility from the hole in a Adobe product DVD, for people that have no business designing, creating or even writing content for web pages?

Isn't there enough of that scam artist nonsense, preying on the ignorance of nubes, rubes and yokels already? Just shoving another set of rose coloured glasses on people's heads to blow smoke up their backside?

Seriously, what you describe for a product is the type of crap I'm trying to stamp out. It's bad enough all the halfwit ineptly developed rubbish people who have NO business making websites sleaze out in idiocy like Dreamweaver, without creating another one.

There's a reason I say if you need anything more than a flat text editor for the majority of site construction, you probably have no business creating websites. "tools" like Dreamweaver are a blight upon the Internet and just like the back-assward halfwit process of starting out dicking around in Photoshop I've never seen a site where either was involved that wasn't an utter and complete failure from an accessibility, usability, functionality or sustainability point of view.

As a dearly departed friend used to say, "The only thing you can learn from Dreamweaver is how not to build websites, and the only thing in terms of web development from Adobe that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their products."

I very much doubt you could create a tool that someone with little or no knowledge of the basic rules of logical document structure and semantic markup could create an actually practical or useful website with.

Hence why the be-all end all of my web development process is called Flo's Notepad 2... since it lets me turn off all the goofy crap like toolbars, the illegible acid trip known as colour syntax highlighting, lets me run as individual windows instead of crammed into a tiny little space by panels or a tabbed interface (It's called the taskbar, USE IT!), lets me set the tab widths, do regex searches, character space conversions, line-ending types, visual indicators for wordwrap, long line guide, etc, etc.

Too many people seem to "want" things they are unwilling to work for, the result is always a disaster.

 

So happy to hear that you're so much better than everyone else at the interwebz, deathshadow. I just asked for input, not arrogant rants about the ineptness of people trying to build webpages. There's a market out there for technologically illiterate people whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.

 

And there is a market out there for all kinds of things. That does NOT mean that supplying that market is ETHICAL, LEGAL, or even REASONABLE.

By YOUR REASONING, just because there is a demand for a product, you should be able to supply that product. There is a big demand for heroin which is MUCH MUCH more profitable that any web crap, so WHY aren't you filling THAT demand instead of stealing peanuts from poor illiterate suckers? Bottom line is that your reasoning is BULLSHIT, plain, simple, period.

Like they say, there is a sucker born every minute, and there are an ABUNDANCE of slime balls around to steal their money. Apparently you want to be one of those slime balls.

 

Woah, woah, here... let's back this up a step. I usually try to limit my attacks to the work and not the person (unless it's the creators of things like jQuery or bootcrap - then it's fully warranted) and this has stepped WAY past those bounds. We're giving this guy a bit too warm a reception when he's not even got enough posts to make links yet.

It might be more productive to explain WHY he's getting this reaction; All of us who are ragging on the very NOTION of creating another one of these "tools" are, well to be frank; the poor sods who get called in when that nube got rogered most roundly by their skipping learning and diving in head first on things they don't understand. WORSE, most of these tools seem to be made by people who don't know enough HTML or CSS to even create such tools in the first place. You can see it in garbage like that stupid malfing mm_swap scripttardery in Dreamweaver doing CSS' job, or on CMS systems like turdpress where they seem to think every element needs a dozen or more classes on it.

We're generally so sick of people being led down the garden path and off the cliff into the sea, that a LOT of us are just plain DONE playing lifeguard.

There is a list of things that I don't think you can make a "for nubes" tool actually accomplish, but if you could, well.... This will probably be way more helpful than the outright attacks you've gotten so far.

1) do not use <style> or style="", styling of elements belongs in the external stylesheet with the possible exception of when something like font-size or width is conveying data -- like in a tag cloud or progress bar. In ANY other situation, keep the damned appearance OUT OF THE MARKUP!

2) do not use presentational classes in the idiotic "OOCSS" style or like how nonsense like bootcrap pisses all over websites. Also don't use vague/meaningless classes and id's like "style" since that's going to make it a pain in the ass for when one of us who actually know what we're doing have to follow it around with a scooper and paper bag like we were walking an incontinent dog in the city. Just as tags should say what things ARE or WOULD BE in a professionally written document, it's a good idea to do that with your ID's and classes to... or at least with ID leverage names that could also be helpful with things like hashes. There's a reason my outermost container is usually <div id="top">, so I can <a href="#top">Back to Top</a> if desired. Just as I tend to call my mainMenu #mainMenu or my main content area #content. I don't call things .sideBar because they might not even BE a sidebar, and since they may not be related to the content using the pointlessly stupid ASIDE tag isn't right either.

3) do not make it rely on bloated garbage framework stupidity like jQuery or Bootcrap. They do NOT make it easier no matter how many people who know **** about **** claim it does.

4) Maintain a logical document structure with logical heading orders -- remember that the h1 is the header under which all content on a page is subsections of -- which is why the site title or logo is the best candidate for that. H2 are there to indicate the start of a subsection of the H1, H3 indicate the start of a subsection of the h2 before them and so forth down the line, with a horizontal rule HR meaning a change in topic or section where a heading is unwanted or unwarranted. This is why HTML 5's SECTION, ARTICLE, NAV, ASIDE and FOOTER tags are pointless redundancies.

MAYBE if what you were creating could manage or organize the important part -- CONTENT -- separate from the appearance to give tree-like overview of the headings and their corresponding content sections, that might actually help people learn something that I know hand coders that still bone that one up!

5) Speaking of HTML 5-tardery, skip using those tags I just named since to work in legacy browsers you need shims and polyfills and all sorts of other unnecessary bloat. Those tags are COMPLETELY redundant to what numbered headings were SUPPOSED to have been providing from the day HTML was created -- it's just most people are too stupid to realize that tags have meanings separate from their default appearance. If you need garbage like "modernizr" or "html5shiv" you are probably doing something WRONG. Like using tags that never had any business existing in the first place and/or were designed to drag things back to the worst of pre-strict 1997 style code.

6) Speaking of 1997 style code, for **** sake do NOT let it deploy 4 tranny or any of the goofy tags and atributes that have no business being on any website created in the past 18 years, that it seems most people STILL sleaze out on brand new sites. <center>, align, border, target -- don't use them. Nor is class="center" the workaround on that, see #2.

7) This is 2015 not 2003, please use native wrapping behaviors instead of pointless dummy clearing elements... and don't use that class="clearfix" stupidity either. There's no need for it in any site going all the way back to IE 5.5 if you have any clue what you are doing!

8) For the love of Ghu ENFORCE WCAG AAA standards. Test for colour contrast legibility, do not let them set font sizes or widths in pixels, or generally otherwise ignore accessibility norms. Good sites should use have the following things:

dynamic fonts -- this just means declare your fonts in EM (or %) instead of pixels. It's NOT rocket science and is a major part of accessibility so visually impaired users aren't always having to dick with the zoom.

elastic layout -- have any fixed widths, min/max-widths, paddings, margins and media query breakpoints in EM's

semi-fluid -- having a min-width on body to prevent legacy browsers that can't do media queries from getting a broken layout, and a max-width so that long lines of text do not become hard to follow.

responsive -- have layouts able to adjust to the available screen width so there's no sideways scrolling.

9) Do not fill it up with pointless META and SCRIPTS that add nothing of value to the page for actual users.

10) actually explain what a keywords meta is, test if it's 8 words or less and bitch if it goes past that, and for Joe's sake test it for on-page relevancy. The same tack should be taken with the description meta since it too has a specific role that a lot of hoodoo-voodoo SEO types have repeatedly led people astray on.

11) Don't use JS to do CSS' job. About half of what people are using JavaScript for these days falls into that category.

12) Actually try to explain what tags are being used and what they MEAN, since there's more to a website than what it looks like on the screen in front of you. Again, semantic markup exists for a REASON.

13) Do not force functionality via JavaScript. As the unwritten rule of JavaScript goes, "If you can't make a fully functional page without JavaScript FIRST, you likely have no damned business adding scripting to it!"

Basically good scripting should enhance the functionality, not provide or supplant it.

-------------------------

... and that's just the START of the laundry list.

I have NEVER seen a WYSIWYG or "web builder" or any of that nonsense that even came CLOSE to meeting ANY of the above qualifications, and it screws over nubes time and time and time and time again.

IF, IF you could actually implement the above in such a tool, everyone here would give you a big sloppy wet kiss and then probably follow you around with a waffle cone in the hopes you crap strawberry ice cream. It would be a literal miracle even the fairy tales in the Bible couldn't match.

 

Deathshadow... thank you for the well thought-out response, and for not comparing my intent to stealing peanuts or selling heroin (or heroin-laced peanuts?).