Hi Charlie, I am going to be very very honest with you here.
I have many old websites that were created in Bootstrap 3 with Dreamweaver or Espresso and the reality is that I am just leaving them in there to do the required alterations needed, this is much quicker than trying to import them or recreate them in Wappler.
New websites I am creating for new projects are being done directly in Wappler from the start, and from a design perspective it works very well, perfect for my needs. Lets say I can create a static website 10% faster in Wappler than Dreamweaver and probably 30% faster than in Espresso.
For me static websites were fortunately never really a major concern as to how long they took to generate, they were fairly simple and took a short time to create. Lets say on average 2 to 3 days work and I could generally have a little 10 page static website up and running and designed. Larger static websites would take probably 2 to 3 days to get all the templates i needed together and then from there an unknown amount of time to add all the information required.
My issue always came from dynamic websites, backend systems, content management systems etc. In Dreamweaver (without DMXzone extensions) or Espresso.
Lets stick with a static website for the purposes of this example, my client comes to me with their 10 page simple static website, but as you know almost every website needs a contact form, or a subscribe to our newsletter form. if I wanted to create a simple page on my website with the following functionality.
- Have a form on page, have it write the client completed contents of the form to my database, email the user and client a copy of the completed data, allow the user to upload an image or two.
So as you can see that should be a very simple form, or so it seems on the surface, dig a little deeper and really look at what added functionality that simple form is going to need.
- You do not want duplicate entries in your database, so you need to check the database to see if the user already exists.
- You need some form validation so the user can not just complete any form field with anything they want, maybe lets even have the submit button hidden until all data is completed.
- You need to restrict some form fields to only allow numbers, or only allow characters, or a minimum / maximum amount or characters.
- You need to show the user a success message, or an error message, maybe redirect the user to another page depending on success or failure.
- You need to resize the uploaded image, and/or crop it to an aspect ratio suitable for your website design.
- You need to email the user one message with different data than you are sending to your client.
- Your client email probably needs to have captured some browser data for the client to make better decisions.
Well with all the above on my 2-3 day build, that one page is now going to double the time it takes me to do what the client requires, its also going to double my quote to the client. Maybe I am not the best coder out there because honestly to manually add the code required to do what I want mentioned above would have taken me a further 3 days in any of the other platforms i used.
In Wappler, I would say quite comfortably that same form would take my 15 minutes to have completed, working, with more functionality than i even wanted. To me it is a winner.
I think if you look at your general day to day needs and find that for your requirements that this functionality is not that important then stick to your current applications, if you want this sort of power and much much more though or think you might need it in the future then rather start growing your Wappler skills now while much of the community is at a similar level.
In South Africa I could not live without owning a car, if I lived in London, I could. So figure out if you can get away with walking, riding a bike, or if you need to drive to get to where you want/need to be.
