There ultimately is one choice you have to make when choosing a website builder.
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You want to future proof your website forever.
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You want to create content without much fuss and with a high level tool that helps and simplifies.
For some reason many people seem to conflate the two, as if there really can be a tool that solves both.
That’s a practical impossibility. A hypothetical tool that was visual enough to meaningfully hide all HTML and CSS concepts, while working with just the HTML file, would need to extract meaning that isn’t conveyed by just HTML.
What use is a visual editor that doesn’t let you edit a slideshow as a slideshow, but only as a collection of images with a weird layout? #2 tools have their own internal concept of what a slideshow is, and save that to their own proprietary file format, which then lets you edit the slideshow directly.
So all this is to say, if you want #1 you can’t escape the HTML common denominator, which means using non-visual tools (or visual tools which ultimately drop you down into HTML/CSS), integrating different components at the code level and generally having an understanding of what the different parts of HTML, CSS and JavaScript do.
#1 is a perfectly reasonable thing to pursue, there’s a great choice of tools. These days web technologies are so many and so complex that it kind of requires HTML/CSS to become your job, to follow along the coding community and to own your tools and frameworks. But I’m certainly biased.
If you can’t do #1 or actually prefer #2, you’re in luck. There are many tools, their existence is legitimate and not an alternative to #1 tools.
Just don’t hold your breath for something that does both 1 and 2. They’re lying if they promise, and will fail in delivering (see Macaw).
I feel a bit of an intruder on this forum, and wish the Freeway folks luck. This is an excellent, tight knit community, definitely a great asset.
Duncan
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