Most studio sites are assembled in a page builder. Ours is not. Every line of this site was written by hand, and this first note explains why.
A builder is a middleman
Page builders exist so that people who do not write code can change a page. That is a real need, and it is why we still build client sites on them when the client wants to edit things themselves. For our own site, nobody needed that. A builder would only have stood between the design and the browser.
What it bought us
- Weight. The whole home page, with its styles and motion, is about 90 kilobytes. There is no framework and no library behind it.
- Exactness. The page in the browser is the page that was designed. Nothing was approximated to fit a module.
- Motion that behaves. The windows, the dock and the carousel run on springs rather than fixed timers, so you can grab them mid-move and they respond.
What we kept
WordPress is still underneath. It runs this journal, the contact form and the page addresses. We dropped the builder, not the engine.
Would we recommend it?
For a site its owner wants to edit by hand every week, no. For a site that should feel like one considered object, yes. If you are deciding between the two, tell us what you are making and we will say which we would choose.