Niko you started a very good discussion here!
We are having the same discussion when trying to redo the Wappler.io site. We want to organize it that way that appeals to all Wappler users and potential users.
I think we should improve the content and targeting of wappler.io in a way that features and possibilities are quickly filtered and focused on the user level and experience.
With Wappler we target 4 user groups:
- web designers - more visually oriented and not technical at all, beginners
- front-end developers - also visually oriented but well aware of the web dev technologies primarily front end
- back-end developers - coders, cms builders looking for productivity increase and power tools
- mobile developers - this is actually a category on its own having also various levels of user experience from beginners to advanced users
So we should somehow divide the users/features on the site content to quickly filter the user and show him the features of Wappler that appeal mostly to its level of interest.
There is no need, and can be very confusing, to talk about complicated back ends and cms to beginner web designers as well talking about cool visual beginners design to hard core devs.
A good example of quick user segmentation is webflow.com they have a good appealing landing page and quickly filter the features based on interest
Indeed Wappler’s most active current user base is more freelancer/cms builder based because of the history of Wappler with DMXzone and the productivity of our extensions as well App Connect and Server Connect as superb front-end and back-end frameworks to get the job quickly and effective done.
But as we are replacing Adobe Dreamweaver ans specially Adobe Muse - more and more web designers and beginners are turning to Wappler as a first choice tool to also learn web design.
The good thing about learning with Wappler is that you can grow your knowledge together with the product, start with simple web sites but expand just as your knowledge grows, to more advanced dynamic and reactive web sites that you normally build only with sophisticated front-end frameworks like React, Angular and VueJS as well back ends.
We have being approached by many learning organizations and schools already - specially ones that have courses of learning web design with Dreamweaver. They see it is a dead end - so are looking for new grounds. But learning organizations move slowly and also want to see tons of users as proof concept, so they wait in producing their own materials.
With the advantage of Wappler that the tools stays productive and visual even for the most complicated solutions. While when doing that all by yourself - specially with the complicated front-end and back-end frameworks you need many die hard coders to do the job.
But you also brought a very good point here is that sometimes the end customers try to dictate your solution and the tools you use. This is very common with specially large corporations. They come to you and ask for Angular solution for example. Why? Because they’ve heard of it too much and Google is behind it so it must be good. Years later and having lost tons of money they discover that Angular is actually too complicated and they start again. This happens all the time.
So we should break all those old fashion rules and be clear with Wappler. And the more its user base grows the easier it will get also for larger businesses and learning organisations to jump in.
Maybe @ben and @brad have an opinion to share as well