Do WordPress End Users Really Need Page Builders?

Have you ever seen a common WordPress end user taking part in conversations over stack exchange where developers ask development related questions? Or have you ever seen a layman who cannot design, who doesn’t know a thing about aesthetics, sharing shots at Dribbble? I am pretty sure your answer is NO! 

We Developers/designers Are Guilty#

So, why is that? It’s pretty obvious that an end user who has nothing to do with development or design really has nothing to do with programming and design. But we are guilty! we (developers and designers) are guilty of one thing, submerged in the deep detail oriented sea of programmable options & design aesthetics we often forget about the end user.

Ask yourself, what an end user wants and what does an end user really needs? These are the questions, we forget to answer and deprived of actual feedback in a sheep walk towards less performant, less affective, remotely intuitive systems we keep on building unnecessary stuff i.e. Page Builders.

I mean no offense to any of the companies/dev/designers, I just mean to address this voice in my head which keeps telling me to stop, while I appreciate every other (new) page builder which comes in to play.

My Take on Page Builders#

While I like all the page builders and such other solutions present in the WordPress industry, at the same time, I also don’t like them for one big reason. The obvious reason! End users are not designers/developers, they are not meant to design things. Just for a second here stop whatever you are doing and compare a designer who spent five to ten years learning, experimenting, pixel perfecting and experience modelling with an end user who bought a page builder to design his site. What do you feel about it? Is it the future or the doomsday, if I could just call it that.

Re-Thinking Our Approach#

In my humble opinion we need to re-think our approach because the way things are and where they are headed, are going to lead WP to more mess and less of what we might call the future WordPress. We should be building niche specific and application specific piece of software. I think user experience is a necessary evil and we need to evaluate ourselves, our projects and our ideas. What do you think?