Jumping in here: I have used Pinegrow, and I can’t imagine there is any learning curve to opening an existing site and changing words. But if you open a blank page, the difference between it and Freeway is really striking.
If you’re familiar with Bootstrap and its conventions and available components, then the options of what you can drag to the page and start customizing (it’s really just like using Backdraft, in a way) will seem familiar enough. There are pre-built rows (horizontal slices of the page) with various popular layouts, like the “3 circular icons with a short product feature below each” module, or the “big-ass Carousel” module. If you see something you like in the stack of possible layout parts, and drag it to the screen, you can then start fiddling with it. The tools for this are not as straightforward or discoverable as I would like, but they are there. If you can organize your design thoughts around a 12-column grid (kinda like looking through a picket fence at your mental sketch) then I can imagine it being a very productive tool after an initial bit of head-scratching.
The primary benefit of this application is that you are building on top of a framework that gives you responsive for free. You can very easily build a layout in one breakpoint, without looking at the others, and get something workable at all breakpoints without thinking about it or click-click-dragging anything. The convenience and speed of this approach cannot be overstated.
Bootstrap makes it incredibly easy to build a “Bootstrap-looking” site. I can make something handsome in moments, using a text editor and a collected understanding of what the classnames are and how they have to be nested in order for the layout to work. Pinegrow makes it easy to get this part right. You pay for that ease with the *“80% problem”, unless your client likes that look, in which case you make bank and go home early.
Like any opinionated framework, Bootstrap makes it very difficult to go off the rails and do something unique. I’m not saying this is impossible – it’s very definitely not – but you have to know the rules in order to break them here. Contrast that with Freeway’s cheerful long toss of the rules into the middle distance, letting you do anything you want and writing whatever tortured HTML+CSS is necessary to support this ignorance whenever you press Publish. If a blank page fills you with inspiration, rather than dread, then the DTP approach (not present in Pinegrow as far as I can see) will be your best friend forever. If you prefer a set of guides, then the Bootstrap Pinegrow technique can give you a great starting point, at the expense of making it harder to make something that doesn’t look like every other Bootstrap site.
I’m not choosing sides here, mind you, because I have noticed my own designs becoming less ambitious since I learned the rules. But my newer pages are much more efficient and easier to use as templates, and that does matter for the kind of work I do.
Walter
*The last 20% of the job consumes 80% of the budget/time.
On Aug 6, 2016, at 12:22 AM, JDW email@hidden wrote:
Thomas, what is the “basic knowledge” that is required to use Pinegrow?
I watched your video and saw you easily import your existing site, then change text, all without using code or reading a manual. So again, what knowledge is required to use Pinegrow?
–James Wages
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