ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Dave Erickson 00:30

Welcome to the ScreamingBox technology and business rundown Podcast. I'm Dave, your host along with Iman and Botond and today we are going to be talking to Jen Kramer. For over 20 years Jen has been teaching and practicing web design and the meaning of quality websites. She's taught web design, educational technology and storytelling principles to students from Harvard University and other academic institutions, as well as teaching in a workshop in corporate environments. She recently gave a great talk at the no code conference, which I also attended, and she is a published author with her most recent book, 'Before you code, validate your idea, build a better product and plan your way to success', which she co authored with Heather O'Neil. Her previous books include 'Joomla start to finish', and 'Joomla 24 hour trainer'. Jen earned a bachelor's degree in Biology at the University of North Carolina, she got her master's degree in internet strategy management at the Marlborough college graduate school, and a graduate certificate in learning design and technology from the Harvard Extension. Wow, that's a pretty good background there, Jen. So is there anything I left out or maybe you can tell us a little bit about your no code background?

Jen Kramer 01:48

Sure. I've been a no coder since I got into this industry in 2000. I started with Dreamweaver back in the day when it was Macromedia Dreamweaver and version three specifically back before we had CSS, when we were just working pretty much with HTML at that point in time and then later, the content management system started to rise. Joomla was leading the pack at the point in time that I jumped on board. It was previously called Mambo before the open source fork happened, and it became Joomla. So I started in the Mambo days, and with Joomla, stuck around in that world for many years.Then, as I transitioned more into teaching, I did much more with HTML and CSS. So I taught a lot of code in that regard for many years along with user experience, user interface design and now I'm getting into the third wave of no code for the web, which is all of the fantastic tools that are getting released now, things like Web Flow and Bubble and Air Table, Zapier and there's so many other options that are out there.

Iman Kaur 02:57

I See, Jen, that you have a biology degree. So what made you switch your career?

Jen Kramer 03:03

Yeah, so I'm so old that there was no web when I was in college; it was very much in its infancy. And there was no real way of creating websites at that point in time, other than a very hacky sort of environment. There's a handful of websites that were out there, people were sort of teaching each other how it was all done. So biology was actually a great field to major in, because it teaches you the scientific method, thinking about a particular problem, thinking about what... why things are the way they are, developing a hypothesis to test that, designing an experiment around that, changing variables, measuring results. All these things are things that we do in programming too. So it was great preparation to put me on the path towards web development and web design. So the actual triggering moment for me that made me switch from biology into web design, I was working in science business, and I realized my happiest days were working on the company website. So it was in early 2000, the stock market was going gangbusters so I just said aah it's gonna be great, quit my job, six weeks later, the bottom fell out of the stock market. I enrolled in grad school in September of 2000, graduated in August of 2001 and my first client meeting happened on September 10, 2001. So I started in this field, and fortunately, I stuck around ever since then.

Botond Seres 04:41

We've been told that you've written a couple of Joomla books, Jen. So, I do have a tiny bit of experience with Joomla myself. I mean, I did not personally ever use it, but we do have an old company site that still runs on Joomla, like an extremely old version of Joomla. So I was wondering if you think that Joomla is still relevant. And as a follow up question, what do you... what is happening these days and CMS space?

Jen Kramer 05:11

Yeah, well, so Joomla was very much a leader in the open source content management system space. So it's always... it's really to this day, it's still Joomla, Wordpress, or Drupal if you're talking about those types of systems. And Joomla was a very early leader, because in the very early days, WordPress was blogging, strictly blogging, that's all it did. Like you couldn't even make pages with it like you can now. And Drupal has always been a bit more on the complicated side. So as time has gone along, when all three of these software packages started off, they were all open source and they were all pretty even. And then WordPress and Drupal, got very smart. And by the way, they both have single, single founders, they have very limited number of founders, They decided to go chase some venture capital money, they put in foundations to support the projects and they got millions and millions of dollars behind them, which allowed them to push WordPress and Drupal as solutions, given more marketing ability, and so forth. Joomla was founded by a group of people. It was about 20 or so founders who were dissatisfied with the way Mambo was doing things and they broke off and formed the Joomla project. And Joomla has steadfastly decided to follow that community based model for dealing with their content management system. So they have never chased after venture capital money. Their primary income, like 10 years ago was Google ads, they got $400,000 A year in Google ads and that's pretty much how they made their money. They never really put together... I know, it's really amazing, right? They never really put together a foundation or anything to float them along or put a lot of money behind them. So what you find is that in the United States, it's really WordPress, or Drupal and if you're building big complicated systems where you have lots and lots of people, you wind up going with a platform like Drupal. If you are doing smaller websites, you do something like WordPress, which is powering some ridiculous amount of the web at this point, like 40 to 50% of the web is powered by WordPress, remember that that's a lot of small sites. So Joomla in the United States has been very much squeezed out. You'll still find it used a lot in Europe, because it has very good multi-language support and it's used a lot in other parts of the world as well. Again, if you have more than one language, Joomla is really a great system to use for that particular type of thing. They just released version four of the software that just came out, this summer, I think, or a little bit... like August: I think it was.. they finally released version four, but Joomla three came out in 2012. So it took nine years for them to come out with the next version of their software, thus, you know the community behind these types of packages. So the new Joomla has bootstrap five baked into it. It's got a brand new interface. They've made a lot of strides and are doing a lot of things. I think there's a lot of arguments that some of the stuff that's in Joomla now should have been there 10 years ago, there's no reason it couldn't have been, except for money. When you aren't paying your developers and it's all a community based project, you wind up with, I think, projects that lag behind as opposed to Drupal and WordPress where you have money behind them, and they are able to push along in their developments.

Iman Kaur 08:40

So I saw that no code was very limited to customization early on. How is it working now? How are the developers adding customization to the no code these days?

Jen Kramer 08:55

In terms of customizing new code, tools, and so forth?

Iman Kaur 08:57

Yeah, like adding customers, because it was very limited, right?

Jen Kramer 09:02

It depends on what no code tool you're working with. Okay, so at the low end, if we're talking about customization, let's define it as the design,okay. We're talking about designing something at the very low end with the least amount of customization. You will look at something like Softer or Pori. Those two packages are literally like I want a heading, I want a navbar, I want three boxes where I can put in some pricing and they have these little interfaces you can just drop in; they chunk together like a series of rows on top of each other. And maybe within those rows, you can change a little spacing, you can change the font and change the color too, but fundamentally, they are what they are. You're gonna have to dig into CSS if you want to customize them. Now, that's perfect for a lot of people who have no design chops and or they just want to hook it up to a database and they want to make things display in a pretty sort of way. It's a great tool for that. For graphic designers, you're going to be looking at something more like Web Flow, or Editor X, which is from Wix. The people who make Wix, Editor X is the more advanced end of that spectrum. Both Web Flow and Editor X give you great control over how exactly a web page is going to look.

Iman Kaur 10:19

That's great. And also, I think you mentioned quality websites. So what do you mean by that exactly?

Jen Kramer 10:27

Yeah. So websites, remember, we're not just the technology that drives them and technology is just the supporting material to tell a story. A quality website needs to tell a really good story: it needs to tell it it in a coherent way from top to bottom, it needs to engage visitors, engage viewers and convince people to do whatever the call to action for that web page is, buy something, sign up for something, subscribe to something, watch something, whatever it is. So that's a really big, important part of a quality website. You also want to think about usability, you want to make sure that it's a very usable website, people understand why they're there, what they're doing and how to get it done. And then the technology is just really there to support it. In a really well designed website, the technology melts into the background, you're just not aware of it.

Iman Kaur 11:19

So about no code, do you think no code is actually relating to the quality website? How would you recommend going that way? You sort of understand.

Jen Kramer 11:32

Yeah, so I got into this business, because I bought into this very early definition of the web, which was, it was a democratizing force in the world, where people could get on board the web, and they could say whatever they wanted to say. They could communicate with people however they wanted to communicate with people and that, for me, is still very much a driving reason to be on the web. We're now at a point where people are just thinking about it as a cash machine. I think we just sort of make these things and the money just sort of comes in. I mean, I'm not really loving that particular trend, but I really love the democratizing aspects of the web. And so I want everyone in the world to have a way that they can get online and say whatever it is that they have to say. Which means that, some people have the coding chops to go and build whatever it is they need to build; other people don't have that ability, or don't want that ability or don't need that ability. And no code tools fill a very important space as the people that Adolo always say, 99.1% of the world has no idea how to code. Microsoft says, we're going to need 500 million new applications in the next five years, 450 million of them are going to be no code, because we just don't have enough programmers to build them all. So no code is gonna be really important to moving technology forward.

Dave Erickson 13:04

The thought process before you even touch the concept of coding is really one of the more important aspects of quote "building a website" and it seems to be part of your theorem of a quality website, is thinking about it beforehand. And one of the ways to do that is people have to do a lot of research into what they want their website to actually do and what their market is. A lot of that work would usually either occur outside of a person who would normally code or is an entrepreneur who's trying to learn no code tools, because he already has all that other stuff. But that design aspect seems to be pretty important and a lot of people now are using a lot of these design tools like Canva and Figma to lay stuff out. Although a lot of the no code tools have their own design centers within them, is it better for people to try to put together their website concepts using, say Figma versus going into Webflow and just trying to use Webflow for that work? What's your feeling about that concept?

Jen Kramer 14:18

So when we teach it UX is the following: after you get past all of the stuff that we were sort of talking about there, the strategy, the information architecture, the text you're going to put on the website, the pictures you've picked out, you picked out color palettes and branding, and there is a ton of work to do before you ever start to get into, What is the interface going to look like? There's a whole lot of things you have to be thinking about first, but let's just assume that stuff is already done. The best way to get into designing the interfaces for your website is actually to start with, as ugly as possible. Draw on a piece of paper, or make black and white drawings if you need to. Do something on a screen that will show the general placement of those elements within that particular.. Whatever screen size we're talking about at that point in time. Place the elements there on the screen and show them to the client early. The reason why is that when things look bad, you are more likely to get feedback. If it looks too polished and too perfect, then people go, Oh, well, I guess that's what I'm getting, I'm too afraid to give you any feedback, this looks expensive, I am afraid to make changes to it at this point in time. So that's where I would actually recommend starting at. Get that general placement stuff out of the way. Now, some people really love Figma, they really want to jump into Figma, they want to do the layout there. It's helpful to have those drag and drop elements. You can drag and drop in whatever it is that you want, you don't have to worry about the code behind it, and so forth. I think there's some arguments to be made that if you know, Figma, you can probably crank out an interface relatively quickly with that, as opposed to putting it into Webflow. And you're you're starting to think more about the programming aspects of it, changing things and controlling things centrally or globally, as opposed to on an element by element basis, it's very easy to make a very messy web page with Webflow if you're tweaking each element individually. Ideally, you want to do things globally, and then make exceptions as you get in towards individual elements within the web page that's actually based on programming, as opposed to being a Webflow thing. So generally speaking, that's the direction that you want to go with this. That is what I would recommend. The right tool for the job is the one generally that you know, but bear in mind that if you start with something ugly, you'll get more feedback on it, then you can take it to the next level, whichever direction that is that makes sense for you.

Botond Seres 16:53

I was wondering what no code platforms are the most popular right now and what their individual strengths may be. Here’s some background, and why I'm asking this question is I'm constantly getting just blasted with ads for Squarespace. I know that that must be quite popular and I feel like it's quite an expensive service and it's amazing at what it does. But I don't know as a web developer, myself; it's a bit strange how limited it is in some aspects. And I was wondering what kind of platforms are out there that could be much stronger in certain areas?

Jen Kramer 17:42

Sure. Okay. So here's the thing, you have to remember, if you go back to the content management system days it was, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, back in the days before Wordpress.com. So in other words, if you wanted to run Wordpress, you had to download it, install it on your web host and all the rest of it. The biggest trip ups for people in those days who are not technical, they just needed to maintain their website and make updates and post things and so forth. The biggest trip ups were dealing with a hosting company, dealing with updating Wordpress itself, dealing with updating all of the plugins and all of the rest of that kind of stuff and making backups. These are things that clients generally are not interested in doing. They believe that stuff should just happen magically and automatically.

Botond Seres 18:33

It's a huge pain to just update any kind of framework

Jen Kramer 18:36

It is enormous... Oh, it's awful. It's awful. And in my Joomla days, where my company was managing, you know, 80-85, Joomla websites at a time, they'd release a new version of Joomla, we'd have to go through and individually for each one of those Joomla sites, click all the buttons to make the backup and update the things and make sure we tested and it was just ridiculous, right?

Botond Seres 18:58

That's assuming that nothing gets broken, but ....

Jen Kramer 19:00

Exactly. And since when does that ever happen? So you will find that all of these no code tools have a relatively high price on them and that price is reflecting all of that work. So it's not just the $5 a month web hosting that you had. All of those tools, within that cost, you are paying for the hosting, all of the security updates, all of the upgrades, all of the plugins, the advances that are made on the tool itself, and 24/7 customer support; you actually have someone that you can call. So you are generally going to find all these new code tools have, you know, it's very common to have a $12 a month or a $20 a month price tag to start with for each website and that is the reason why that's where that money comes from. Does that help you somewhat?

Botond Seres 19:56

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So what kind of platforms are out there these days? So we already discussed Joomla and Squarespace, but I'm sure there are many more that... I'm sure you're more familiar with them.

Jen Kramer 20:09

Yeah, so let's say, down at the very basics in the free range, you can get a free Wix account which has advertising on it. You could get one called Carrd C-A-R-R-D dot CO relatively inexpensively. It's a little, I think, $12 a year. There's also a free version of it that gives you a one or two page website, landing page kind of thing. Yeah, let's just put up a really quick and easy web page.

Botond Seres 20:40

That's what most companies need for sure.

Jen Kramer 20:46

Yeah. If you just want...

Botond Seres 20:47

Yeah, 9 times out of 10, I usually get requests to make a website and it turns out all they want is basically like, a page that has a Google Maps on it with their location and maybe their phone number.

Jen Kramer 21:02

Exactly, exactly. So Carrd might be perfect for that. Squarespace has advantages, come in and where it's got lots and lots of really big gorgeous, juicy pictures and a little bit more maybe wiggle room in terms of the layout and rearranging things on the page, a little bit more wiggle room in terms of tweaking fonts and colors, and that kind of thing, perhaps more than some of the other platforms. They are deliberately limited. As we know, as software developers, the more features and functionality you add, almost inherently the more difficult interfaces become. So by scaling back choice, you scale back the complexity of the interface. So many of them build in a pyramid kind of fashion, that if you dig in far enough, you may eventually find a setting where you can change something. Squarespace is really good at this, it may take you six clicks to customize the thing, but it's in there eventually. Or they just get rid of those choices altogether, as in platforms like Softer and Pori, where you know, there's five things you can change and that's all there is to it. That's sort of like that low end kind of, I just need that calling card style website type of thing. Pori and Webflow also have the ability to integrate with things like Airtable. So Airtable is a database, which they call a base because database is too scary of a word. So but it's a database, it looks like a spreadsheet and you can have multiple tables and joins and things talk to each other. You can then connect that to something like Webflow or to Pori or Softer and have that database information displayed on a web page. You'd be surprised how many people do this. It's amazing how many people want to do that.

Botond Seres 21:39

Oh, everyone, that's what all people want to do. Obviously, that just makes me so mad because every application is just another crowd application.

Jen Kramer 23:07

Just another one of them and what's interesting to me is, within a WordPress environment, you do exactly the same thing, right, but all your plugins are vetted so you already know that the whole universe plays with each other, everything's gonna work just fine together. In a no code environment, you have no idea if you can join these things or not because everything is a standalone application. So if we want for example, we want to join Webflow and Airtable and make them talk to each other. Webflow has an API, Airtable has an API, but the two API's may not necessarily talk to each other so we actually have a meta API to solve that problem, like Zapier, which is all about connecting API's and so it will take the two API's and make them talk to each other.

Botond Seres 23:57

Zapier is an API of APIs

Jen Kramer 23:58

Yeah, yeah. So one of my favorite things was that I did a live demonstration, where I had a Google Doc and in that Google Doc, I could read a blog post and when I took the Google Doc and I saved it into a certain folder on my Google Drive, it could automatically publish that page. It knew exactly what fields to map, that were published on that page, is a WordPress blog and sent the tweet out all at the same time you connect all of the API's to make all of that automation happen with something like Zapier. So there's a lot of craziness. Yeah, that's Yeah…

Botond Seres 24:34

That's awesome. Like that's, that's a package you could just do so it's, I don't know. a $50 price tag.

Jen Kramer 24:41

yeah, yeah. And so that whole automation aspect is going to be really big going forward. You think about all the people who work all day long in spreadsheets and need interfaces for them and add the need to schlep things around for approval. The things we do through email and slack and all the rest of it. Now with a product like Zapier, you can connect all these things together to make that automation happen without having to deal with code.

Dave Erickson 25:08

But the flexibility of all these systems and the automation of say, Zapier, the concept of no code is literally… you don't have to be a developer or someone, but you really do need to have an understanding of development. You need to have an understanding of how code works to even be able to take advantage of a lot of these tools. Yes, if you're building a simple website to throw up some pictures, and an email address or whatever, you can use something like Carrd or you know, web flow might be overkill on it. But to actually make something that does work, that really does require a level of understanding that the average person may not have, they may have to study for it.
Jen Kramer 25:53

Yep, absolutely true. Absolutely true. We are in early, early days in no code land and you will find that everywhere. So we were just talking about Squarespace. Squarespace has the box, as they affectionately call it. And in fact, most of these applications do the box and it just says Custom CSS, here you go, have fun. And you know, there's no guidance whatsoever. If you want to style things, and you know how to write CSS, you can just put it into this box. But that's not really no code, is it? So there's a lot of code left and no code actually is programmatic thinking. Dave, what you're talking about, one of the biggest parts of this is how do we actually train people to think about what comes first, what comes second and what comes third and what is the data that's involved in each of those steps. And where does the data need to go? And how does it need to move? That's actually still very much a part of no code every bit as much as it is for code. So we’re still going to be data and programming architects, even if we're just not writing all the semi-colons and curly brackets.

Iman Kaur 27:00

So, do you think it's gonna be a new feature even for web designers and developers to make things super easy? What can I expect and what can I look for like a no code platform? What are the things I should look for?

Jen Kramer 27:19

As a developer you mean?

Iman Kaur 27:20

As a designer.

Jen Kramer 27:22

As a designer? Yeah. Yeah. So this is the classic case of designers getting trained with fonts and colors and layouts and making things pretty, and they aren't necessarily trained on code. And believe it or not, 20 years ago, when we had Dreamweaver, and we had Photoshop and stuff, we did all that stuff in Photoshop and we handed it off to a dreamweaver developer who would then slice it up and turn it into a web page. Then we had this long sort of dry spell where programming was developing and designers really, for a long time, had to get into learning how to code mostly so that they could hand off their designs as they intended them to be to developers who could then hook it up to additional programming. So this new round of no code tools is trying to address that Webflow, in particular, has identified that as something that people really need. They're marketing Webflow for enterprise as a way of, You can now lay out your entire webpage here in Webflow, click a button, it'll export the code, and that code, you can then hand off to your development team. Now, the key is just as it was in the Dreamweaver days, is that code actually in good condition. And it's very easy to say make 25 layers of DIV elements, the massively nested boxes, because designers don't know what they're doing in terms of thinking about elements and classes and how the markup should work on a webpage before you hand that off to the development team. So that's really an area where people are going to have a lot of learning to do. Part of my interest now as an instructor, is thinking about how we go about teaching things like HTML and CSS for no code environment. So how do we explain these things without talking about properties and values and Flexbox and block level and inline elements? Let's talk instead about graphic visuals that a designer could relate to, and how they can build good code without actually writing that code.

Iman Kaur 29:30

You know, it actually reminds me of something. So I had a physics professor, I have a background in physics. He used to tell me one thing, Do not memorize anything, you don't need to, you just need to understand, if you need something in the future, which book you should look for and where exactly. I feel like it's something like that, right? So you don't need to memorize, but you have to have an understanding and you have to know where to look. What kind of thing? Does this make sense?

Jen Kramer 29:57

Yes, yes. I think that's fair. No code kind of stuff, you know, again, since we're picking on Webflow, Webflow’s interface is very CSS oriented. It talks about Flexbox. Parents and children, it talks about grid parents and children It talks about padding and margin that talks about pixels versus rems and percents and all the rest of that kind of stuff. If you know CSS, you'll jump into Webflow, and you'll feel right at home. I'm not sure that that's true for a graphic designer though, without a coding background.

Iman Kaur 30:28

But that's the thing to have to have understanding. They should know what they are doing, but they don't need to learn it to be at master level or something like that. They just need to understand it.

Jen Kramer 30:37

Yeah. And the question is where? At what point does that change? Right? Where is that line? How much? How much is enough? I'm not sure where that line is, at this point.

Iman Kaur 30:49

It's gonna be like a new future, because that's what it seems like. Even for the developers and the designers, maybe this is something which is gonna be a handy thing to use, you know, not spending too much time coding and figuring out, and how far we are likely to become.

Jen Kramer 31:09

Yeah, yeah. There have been a bunch of people on the web talking about things like, Do we really need to reinvent the login box again? Do we really need to code that from scratch again? Do we need to code yet another image carousel? Do we need to code more tabs or another accordion panel? I think it's fair to say at this point in time that there are a lot of elements in web design that don't need to be coded over and over again. And that is, those kinds of elements are just right for no code. We can sort of centralize in a way that we tend to do these things and we can make our developer friends say, yes, that's not your code, but you know what, this is still just fine, works a great deal with it. Instead of, you know, developers, if it's not their code, they want to recode it. So there's changes to be made all around?

Dave Erickson 32:00

Well, it seems like there's some opportunities in the no code space in the sense that there might be no code tools that are oriented very much for designers, and to help them convey their ideas to developers. And there may be no code tools that are very oriented towards making the developers job much more efficient. Is that currently like that? Are the tools broken out into that, or they all kind of…

Jen Kramer 32:28

Figma is the one for people who don't know. Figma and similar like Adobe, XD, and Sketch and so forth, those are for designers who have no code background whatsoever. I've had designers hand me off an Adobe XD file; have fun, no idea how you're gonna code that, have a great time. See you later. Maybe you've had that happen too as opposed to something like Webflow, which by its very nature, it's been coded, it may be bad code, it may be horribly ugly HTML and CSS, depending on who put the page together. But it's code, right. So something is coming out that in theory, a developer could do something with. I imagine they'd want to clean it up a bit in some particularly horrible situations.

Dave Erickson 33:13

I know a lot of these no code platforms, as you were talking about earlier, kind of their own ecosystem, their hosting their 24 hour support, updating security, etc. But one of the disadvantages I think you get or an apparent disadvantage, you get a URL that's basically you know, your website name dot web flow dot whatever, right? Is there a way on these note code platforms to use your own domain names? And does that create any issues with SEO or anything or it's just pretty standard,

Jen Kramer 33:48

generally speaking, all these no code tools have some kind of free version, it may be a short term, free version, or it may be particularly limited, feature limited, and so forth. But let's take Wix, for example, if you're going to publish a Wix site, it's gonna have advertising on it. And it's going to end in wix.io, I think it is. web flow, same thing you can build, like a one page website, it's going to end in web flow.io. But if you give them money, you can have a custom domain. That's generally true for most of these.

Botond Seres 34:20

As a developer, my hiring process must be quite different. So immediately, when I start working on a task or a particular design, I usually just start thinking about the nitty gritty parts, like how do I make that very specific thing work? And that will be quite interesting, because I'm quite interested in how this high level process changes. When working with no codes. What should we focus on first? What are the things that developers usually forget when they are working on local platforms?

Jen Kramer 34:57

Yeah, yeah, you'd probably be more interested in a tool. like bubble, that IO, which is designed for writing web applications. $1, who is one that's more interested in mobile applications. And these are more modeled towards features and functionality. So for example, bubble, when you sign into it for the first time, it'll actually take you through a series of tutorials, which I just think is absolutely a fantastic way to onboard people. The first thing that you build in a bubble is it will give you well, the end, the end state will be a box, you know, like a little search box with a button, and then another box underneath. And the concept is that when you type in an address and hit map, it'll draw in the Google Maps underneath. Really, really straightforward, right? But this is going to introduce all these other concepts, right? That box where you do the typing that has to have a name, and it has to be attached to the button. And the button has to know when it's clicked, what it should do with that information in the box that has the name, and then how that's going to go to a Google API, how the Google API is going to come back and write that information into the box. So you know, that's a really simple web application in microcosm. So with no code, people are going to have to think about this in the same kind of way, if I want to put a map on my webpage, where is that map coming from? Well, I'm going to have to go find some API that will do that. For me, that's also compatible with my no code technology. So it's not just necessarily any API will do. But you know, Google Maps is pretty flexible, and works in a lot of different environments. So that would be one that would work here. And then we're going to have to think about, like, what information am I putting in? So in that box? What are people putting in? What if they type in, you know, whatever, my dog spot, instead of an actual address? How are we going to deal with the error on that? Where is that error going to be written on the page? What's going to happen? When we click that button? Have we got everything lined up such that information is submitted correctly to the API, and so forth? So all of the things that you think about as a developer now, in that type of environment, you're going to have to think about in a no code world as well, it's a question of degree, just as we've been talking about, on the front end, from the very simple tools to the more complex ones, you're gonna have a range in your no code tools as well. So softer, and Puri, for example, which are very good at just displaying the contents of air table types of things. They have the API that connects to Airtable, and then you can decide how you want the information to display how you want to filter it. They're starting to get into, How are we going to make the screens where we enter information, and that's going to write it in the air table. Right. So all of that sort of programmatic thinking about those things, is still still very much part of working with these no code tools. Again, we're just not necessarily writing the database calls, we're not writing the, the working with the actual API's, we're not writing JSON files or any of that kind of stuff. We still have to think very programmatically about where the data is and where it's going to go and how it's going to be interacted with on the page.

Botond Seres 38:19

Right. So basically, that kind of feels like it's a very similar process to just regular development. But that seems to stop at where development starts and engineering ends. So since to me no code is more of a tool that maybe engineers would love over our typical developers, as they would still have to think about the high level concepts such as where do we store the data? How is this data flow gonna go? Where right? Which are the different nodes that it has to go through, which are the different processes it has to be involved with?

Jen Kramer 39:07

Yes, and the end, and the switch side of this is that in a developer world, if you are using this API and that API and that API, you can write all the connecting tissue to make those things do whatever you want. In the no code world, you're going to have to find a tool to deal with every piece of that whatever it is that you want to do. It's going to be doing this thing Airtable is going to be doing. You may have to identify several pieces of technology in order to make them all work together to achieve what exactly it is that you want to do.

Botond Seres 39:39

Right. What do you think about writing plugins for no qualifications? This is something I've been thinking about during this whole podcast. What happens when there's just no tool on the market that does exactly what we want?

Jen Kramer 39:55

Yeah, well, I've been very fond of saying it's 1998 in the no code world, this is what the web looks like in 1998, where we had tons of little startups and lots of venture capital money flowing around, no one knew what they were doing and everyone thought they were going to get rich. Okay? It's just like that in the no code world right now, specifically. There are plugins, like you can write a bubble plugin to do a number of things. For example, bubble just came out with Flexbox, inside of their UI interface. And so now they're coming out with a bunch of different plugins for different kinds of layouts that leverage that Flexbox interface, so more elements for dragging and dropping into bubbles for building your web application. In Webflow land, maybe you'd be selling templates or themes of some kind, as starter points for putting together your Webflow pages. So yeah, there's definitely these supporting pieces of technologies around each of these products, in addition to more and more and more products going on out there.

Botond Seres 40:57

Would this be a good time to start the stuff in my garage? ,

Jen Kramer 41:01

Yeah, it would be a great time. And you would not be alone. There are a lot of people getting into this space.

Iman Kaur 41:07

So I was wondering, how well does no code platform handle ecommerce websites?

Jen Kramer 41:14

Yeah, tons and tons of I mean, shopping carts are just sort of a given and a lot of things these days. So you know, Squarespace, Wix Webflow, all have shopping carts built into them. Everybody's integrating with PayPal and was with stripe, for example. Sometimes there's some other platforms that they integrate with. So the hard thing that people deal with now in terms of E commerce, is, should I be using Squarespace to make my store or should I go with a dedicated shopping cart like Shopify or big commerce or something like that. Or sometimes they still say, Wordpress, I need WordPress, because it has WooCommerce. They think of them as the same, the same tool and that's the only option. So there's a ridiculous number of shopping carts that are out there right now, they all work more or less the same way. They all integrate with PayPal, Stripe and so forth. So what I would encourage you to think about as you think about e-commerce is, are you selling digital products or are you selling physical products, because physical products are always more complicated. Are you going to be having a few products? Are you going to have lots and lots and lots of products and are those products going to have lots of permutations? So if it's a shirt, or do we have colors, do we have sizes, you know, so forth? So all that adds layers of complexity, the more complex that you need, the more likely it is that you want to be looking at a true shopping cart, like Shopify or big commerce, as opposed to, you know, yeah, I can throw on a little shopping cart on Squarespace.

Dave Erickson 42:54

I have a client, they basically built their e-commerce website in WordPress, which WordPress was never really designed for, and they found out, you know, after having 75,000 items in their store, the performance on WordPress kind of dropped a little bit. So they're having to redo the whole thing. But I guess, picking the right ecommerce platform and for the size that you want to be and thinking that through, obviously, that's going to be a key to even integrating into though code, correct?

Jen Kramer 43:30

Oh, absolutely. So your client probably didn't start with a 75,000 items store, right? What are they? What did they start with?

Dave Erickson 43:38

They don't even remember, but it was probably, you know, a couple 100 items, you know.

Jen Kramer 43:42

A couple 100 items. Okay. So if you're starting with a couple 100 items, maybe WordPress made sense at that point in time. It's never, it's never necessarily a bad thing that you start where you are to get up and running. To see if you can actually make a go of this thing first, before you go and invest in the heavy technology. I'm sure, to your client if you said, Well, we should plan for you to grow to 75,000 items when they're at 100. They probably laugh at you. It's difficult to get that big, but yet here you are later and it does. I had a similar thing happen in the pandemic. So I have a client who's a wholesale bakery, everything dried up in the commercial market for wholesale baked goods. During the pandemic, she had nothing to do and she had all these people that were employed, and she had a full baking system and all these delivery trucks and so she decided, I think what I'll do is, I'll do delivered baked goods to people's houses so they can come online, they can place orders and will deliver to your house,She needed to get up and running fast because she needed to get money fast. So she built a Squarespace website and she put up a few products and it was a smash hit. Then you know, she continued to add products and after about a year she hit a wall, unreal. Well, I've done my proof of concept, I kept my business alive for a year, that was the important goal that I was trying to achieve. And now she's thinking about moving to something like Shopify, where she can take this to the next level. Of course, her wholesale business is coming back too so you know, sometimes just getting something done in a very fast manner is important. And a no code tool can be a really great way to get something out there quickly. And then you'll have the time and the money to deal with the next level later.

Dave Erickson 45:32

Is it easy to move from one no code solution to another platform? Or is that relatively difficult? Or is it easier to take a no code platform that's kind of reached its limit and just custom build a website and back end from there?

Jen Kramer 45:51

Yeah, it's all over the map, because there's hundreds of these things. There's tools like Wix, and Squarespace. Do you have ways of importing from WordPress or exporting to WordPress? WordPress is generally the big competitor in this space with all of these types of tools. Generally speaking, the no code tools want to give you back your content and so forth. They aren't necessarily all that keen on giving you code. So you can't necessarily build your website in Squarespace and then just download, say, a static HTML and CSS and put it up on your own hosting. That's never going to happen. Right. So is that addressed?

Dave Erickson 46:35

Yeah, it sounds like you make your commitment to the no code platform, you build your assets in it and it is what it is. And if you need to move to something else, you're basically starting from scratch, or you know, you might get your content, but you're not going to get a whole lot more than that. Right. Okay. Well, that's something that people need to be aware of with no code platforms.

Jen Kramer 46:56

Yeah, so in the case of your 75,000 ecommerce items, I'm sure that there's some sort of CSV output or whatever that will give you your store and that's probably something you want to check going in, like, does it take CSV uploads? Can it give you a CSV, export, as well? Especially if you're going to grow that big that does that kind of stuff becomes really, really important.

Iman Kaur 47:21

So what do you think about no code platform? Like could it handle AI or machine learning like blockchain in the future?

Jen Kramer 47:31

They already are. Yeah, yeah, those are not things that interest me that much. So I'm really not following all that closely, but you will find already that there are people that are approaching all of those spaces with no code tools, and that they're already out there. People are already experimenting with that. In fact, the people that I've been following on Twitter for this last year, that were all about no code are switching to all like web three, crypto, Blockchain, yada, yada, and all that stuff is like the cool new thing this year, and they're all looking at that. I am not going to go that way. Those of you who want to, you go ahead and do that. My goal is still telling stories online. So I'm not gonna follow that bandwagon. But for those of you who are having a great time, you will find no code solutions.

Dave Erickson 48:15

Yeah. Developers love their toys.

Jen Kramer 48:19

They really did, they really did it.

Dave Erickson 48:24

The concept of no code was that you're able to utilize no code to make a more efficient development process, right? It's not necessarily a replacement for development, because you still need to understand the development process, but for simple things like marketing websites and some landing pages, it's actually a very efficient process. This fits into the concept of developers and agencies. How do they, you know, how does no code kind of fit into, say, an agency development process that in the past, have only just had a bunch of developers doing the coding? They work with the client. Can agencies and maybe single developers start utilizing no code to make their process maybe more efficient or better quality? What's your thoughts on that?

Jen Kramer 49:20

Yeah, I think it's not necessarily efficient or quality. I think it's about different price points and I think it's about making more options available to more people. So we'll go back to how I got started in the business, when I made a website for a client and in Dreamweaver, if they wanted to make updates to it, they had to buy a copy of Dreamweaver and nobody wanted to buy a copy of Dreamweaver because it was a complex environment. It was too hard for the client to use. It's too hard to make those updates and it was expensive. Later, Macromedia added a product called Contribute that was directly for and then towards clients. So it stripped out all the Dreamweaver, all the development tools and it just gave clients that environment where they could go in and make changes to their text and you could use the Dreamweaver templates to lock out various parts of the page that you didn't want your clients editing. It meant that the freelancers who saw that immediately said, Oh, my gosh, my career is over, my business is over, I'm never gonna make any more money ever again, because I'm never gonna update anybody's website. But the truth of the matter was, it freed up all of those people who liked to build websites, to build more websites, and it put that work of those little updates off onto the clients who wanted to do them anyway, because they wanted to do them when they wanted them done. They didn't want to wait to have it done. We're actually at that point now, where we're going to see the same thing happen, but we're very much at a different level. Okay. So obviously, that was back in the early days, it was a very low level where we had to invent our own content management solutions, then we had these kinds of WordPress and Joomla, and so forth. Content Management Solutions, we're at the next level now, where if I want to have a web application, rather than spending 10K, 20K, 30K, and hiring a development team to get my web application, if there's something that's fairly well defined, that we have built over and over again, and think about how many products that are just like that, that we build over and over and over again, but this one is the red one, and that one's the green one and this one has one little feature that makes it different from the other one. That kind of stuff is just right to go to the no code world. So that now I can mass customize, and very quickly build standard sorts of applications for everybody for a much lower price point and the developers are going to continue on doing what they do best, which is following that cutting, bleeding edge of development. So they're going to get to work on more interesting problems. We haven't worked on problems that don't have standardized solutions, problems that need that higher level development mindset, or very customized solutions where we truly have the need to build a very customized solution for just this one environment. Okay. That's where the developers are going to go. All the other stuff that they left behind that they learned in the last 20 years, all that stuff is left behind and can now go to the no coders. That's kind of where I see this sort of stuff going.

Dave Erickson 52:29

Well, Jen, thank you very much for a great conversation. I think we all learned a lot and we look forward to seeing the future of no code and how agencies and developers will be using these tools to further their customers’ and clients’, desires and dreams. Thank you very much for joining ScreamingBox technology and business rundown podcast and to all of our audience. So we will see you next month for next month's installment. Thank you very much for taking this journey with us. Join us for our next exciting exploration of technology in business in the first week of every month. Please help us by subscribing, liking and following us on whichever platform you're listening to or watching us on. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and please let us know any subjects or topics you'd like us to discuss in our next podcast by leaving a message for us in the comment sections or sending us a Twitter DM. Till next month. Please stay happy and healthy.