No-Code Review for Website and Web Application building
// written in 2020: tools, versions and prices may have changed since.
Intro
No code is a recent movement of technology designed to allow those who do not know how to program build web applications, websites, and even mobile apps.
nocode.tech is a website that has an assortment of no-code offerings, describing where each tool is used in the process of developing a web app, website, or mobile app. It from this site that I found Carrd.co for building a website.
No-Code Review from a Software Engineer
I mostly build web applications and websites as side projects, so that is what I will be sharing my experience on.
1.) Basic Website - Portfolio or Product Page
Currently, Time To Solitude is a Gatsby starter template and is hosted on Netlify. Previously, it was a Hugo template hosted on github pages. In both cases, the tech chosen was selected because it is affordable and fits git-based my workflow for writing blogs; both support writing in markdown language. However, carrd.co doesn’t seem optimal for building out a blog, so I used another project to explore it. I built a simple website to showcase a service Resumes for Tech.
In it, the plan offered is access to an Airtable database for a fee. Airtable is another accessible no-code technology used in place of a traditional database and is often paired with the other no-code tools to create a no-code web application.
The total cost for my use case was $19 a year and it took around ~20 hours total for building the page, learning the system, and figuring out how to add Airtable.
2.) Web Application
There are several options here Table2Site and ShareTribe are two I explored but decided against do to price and problem domain; they solved problems I wasn’t worried about and ShareTribe was too expensive.
The problem I wanted to solve was the ability to schedule and offer appointments with payment processing included (easily in a day for my use), which led to another deal-breaker for me;form handling.
In Carrd.co the choice is only Typeform from the widget selection, and it is expensive for what it offers. It doesn’t solve every problem (payment with form + scheduling), so that would mean adding another embeddable service to the site. Meaning, more cost. I think the rough calculation was more significant than $300 when considering the other tech-embedded pieces; appointment scheduling, payment, and auto emailing.
To be fair, it is possible to get by on freemium of the services, but that comes with the standard ‘built by …’ that shows on each page, something I like to avoid when trying to build a brand. And in many cases causes the user to be redirected to another site to complete their business (form completion or appointment scheduling). Again, a breaker to me in terms of user experience.
So, in keeping with the spirit of no-code, I used the GoDaddy website builder because I bought the domain through them and wanted to explore using it.
I was pleasantly surprised by the templates and how easy it was to add features I wanted, here is Resumes for Tech built with GoDaddy.
Yet, the tradeoff is cost, I am paying $25 a month for all the extra features I wanted, and sure an airtable DB or google sheet could probably accomplish the same for free. Still, to me, user experience seems better because users never leave the site. Also, it is less for me to manage, it took around ~ 8 hrs of effort and learning to set up the website.
However, something to note is that the website itself, in terms of styling, is lacking. Because there doesn’t seem to be any choice for editing CSS. Unlike in Carrd.co, which charges a bit more per year for access to the feature.
Conclusion
I think the current state of no-code tools solve basic problems and aren’t extendable outside of the challenges they’re built to solve. Once you start to move outside of the box, the no-code tool was designed to address you begin to hit trouble, and the general solution offered is to spend money for another embeddable piece of software or for access to more advanced tools.
However, I think No-code tools are useful for forcing you to keep the product simple and enable you to get the idea out to the target audience faster.
But, at a certain point, it becomes necessary to move beyond the no-code tool to a custom solution. Hopefully, you keep that in mind when using the device and plan accordingly ( you don’t want to be so locked into a tool that you can’t move off of it).