What's your web platform of choice?

[d.healey]

@Casmat What do you need that you don't get with Gutenberg and a decent starter theme?

[Casmat]

@d-healey Yeahhh, thats also what I'm hearing too, from what ive seen so far, gutenberg's block approach makes it seem clunky terms of ui and not cohesive design wise. Starting from scratch with a starter template could work, but hand coding everything adds dev time.. Basically my entire goal is to have an ecommerce website that looks stunning in terms of design. it needs to stand out from other sites that just seem clunky and unprofessional, which wordpress is quite known for. We need to make a functional site within a month, which the design and functionality seems unrealistic for starting from scratch, which is why I was thinking using an advanced builder could help. I don't really know where to quite start haha, i've made simple static sites on wordpress using the salient WP theme, but something on this scale with much more functionality, I'm wondering how I can achieve a functional website in a timely manner, whilst also looking professional.

[Casmat]

@oskarsh said in What's your web platform of choice?:

Usually the best tool is the one you stick with and learn, its all just html and css in the end.

Yup, totally agree, I'm starting to think to just pick up a builder and when needed, edit html/css/js to match the goal design idea, since no builder will have the same design thoughts as me haha

[DanH]

@Casmat I use the Kadence theme in WP. I also use Wix for another site. I don't see too much difference between them in terms of what can be done design-wise. Post some examples of what you're trying to achieve...

[Casmat]

@DanH https://overflow.io/ This one's good

https://stripe.com/ this one doesn't resonate with me that well, but the things used in here are crazy (animated gradients, static scrolling effect w/ animation, 3d globe shader - possibly made with https://spline.design/, their website also looks great)

https://www.itsoffbrand.com/ this one's definitely pushing the animation bar that I had in mind, but it's still crazy haha

[d.healey]

@Casmat said in What's your web platform of choice?:

this one's definitely pushing the animation bar that I had in mind, but it's still crazy haha

Uh that's horrible

The spline one is nice.

[Casmat]

@DanH How'd you make the cookie popup notification? I've been wondering how and your thing is absolutely fire!!

[DanH]

@Casmat oh a friend did that actually . He made a plugin for me - I haven't got my head around creating plugins in WP yet.

[Casmat]

@DanH Ahhh, that's insane though haha

[Matt_SF]

@Casmat Yeah Bricks requires some minimal knowledge on webdesign practices but it offers indeed a lot of possibilities. I came from elementor and bricks was a gamechanger.
Gutenberg itself allows basic design capabilities and can look professionnal : you just have to know what you want and have basic understanding on html structure, css... And of course there are some great themes out there that can fill some gaps.

I for myself, wanted to be able to customize everything so I went for a builder. But don't go and use just the first you'll encounter. I like Bricks because it's lightweight, the DOM is not a complete mess and - if you know what you're doing, or what you have to do - is relatively easy to use. Oxygen is also good, it's a matter of taste and workflow.

[Casmat]

@Matt_SF thanks! In that case I’ll give bricks a try and see how it goes!

[virtuscapeaudio]

I use Squarespace and like it quite well.

The only issue I have seen is you only get 300MB (yes Megabytes) of storage per digital product. Of course you can workaround this with AWS or google drive direct link, etc.

[Casmat]

@virtuscapeaudio yeah, in our current squarespace site, we use box to host our kontakt/decent sampler libraries. We’re thinking of moving from it since for our design ideas and product scalability, squarespace is more limiting and restrictive in features

[virtuscapeaudio]

@Casmat I missed that you're using Squarespace! How do you integrate box? I use google drive and it's not really the best because anyone with the link can download it. Are there protections against that with box somehow?

[Casmat]

@virtuscapeaudio yeah no haha, with box we also have the same problem! Anyone with the link could share, and other solutions we looked at long back if I remember were more overpriced than just going with box. I mean either way users could reupload the download files on something like gdrive, but a higher upload limit on the digital products should be added to somewhat discourage sharing. I felt it’s kind of absurd they still make it 300 mb in this time and age, squarespace worked as a starting point for us, but it’s just better for future scalability to change platforms for our use case haha

[virtuscapeaudio]

@Casmat ABSURD indeed! AWS cloud seems to be a good way but still haven't figured out how to integrate. Will report back if it would be helpful to anyone at all

[Casmat]

@virtuscapeaudio another way if you’re interested could be using Shopify’s but buttons so all the products are hosted on their servers, but could be more expensive than something like aws s3