WEB DESIGNERS TURN TO LOW-CODE FOR HIGH PAYOFF

Think of a great website you’ve visited lately. Maybe it featured dynamic visuals and on-screen animations, or maybe it was minimalistic and easy to navigate. Either way, it was no doubt the result of some very conscious design and user experience decisions. 

Traditionally, this experience would have been produced by an entire web development team, composed of both designers and developers. The aesthetics and layout you experience on the front-end of the site would have been created by web designers, while the coding necessary to make that vision a reality would have been implemented by developers on the back-end.

But now there are tools that enable designers to create websites without an in-depth knowledge of site-building code. Often referred to as no-code or low-code web development, it is becoming increasingly common for companies to turn to software on web domain hosting sites (like WordPress) to facilitate design ideas.

One such software available for WordPress is called Elementor, a full-service, custom website development platform. Elementor makes it possible to build a design-first, no-code website, all the way from design to deployment. 

With Elementor, the accessibility of site building is enhanced by drag-and-drop widgets and live editing. Designers select widgets from a panel and simply place them where they want them to appear on the page. The available widgets range from simple text blocks and images to interactive user polls, scrolling image carousels, and Lottie animated graphics. Moreover, with some light coding knowledge, web designers can create custom Elementor widgets that are tailored to their clients’ needs.

Designers are able to view what the website will look like through live editing, in which a preview of each page and all ongoing edits is available. They can easily determine whether widgets have been placed to their liking, and if not, moving them is as simple as dragging them to a new location. 

Cutting down on back-end coding in the web design and development process offers a number of benefits that are valuable for businesses. First of all, the development time is greatly reduced, meaning that a web team can be not only more productive but also more ambitious with their projects. Research suggests that low-code web app development can eliminate 50-90% of the development time that would be spent building a website completely from scratch. 

This is great for custom web development companies who can use a tool like Elementor to spend less time on coding and more time on site enhancements and client requests that would have previously been impossible to accomplish within the same timeframe.

Another huge boon to using Elementor is that it is optimized for SEO. By improving page loading and response times, Elementor helps ensure that your site stays in the search engine algorithm’s good graces. Pages built through Elementor are also fully responsive which is a critical factor to search engine optimization. This means that a website’s format will be adjusted and optimized to suit the type of device that accessed it.

Low and no-code applications are constantly coming out with new features. Learning to use these features proves fairly intuitive and doesn’t require a ton of training before they can be implemented. This allows custom web design companies to expand the tools in their arsenal and offer exciting new website features to their customers.

Last, but certainly not least, is the accessibility of low-code websites for clients. Elementor upgrades the web admin experience with a back-end that is easy to navigate. For clients who want to make frequent site updates (such as customer testimonials, blog posts, or portfolio additions), it is ideal to have a website with a back-end that requires little to no coding experience. 

Elementor is not the first of its kind – in fact, the concept of low-code website development isn’t all that novel. For years, low-code design was something our company refrained from embracing because there was no option that offered us the creativity and flexibility we needed in order to deliver the best results for our clients.

However, Elementor strikes the perfect balance between ease of use and full design customization. It allows us to meet our clients’ front-end development needs and deliver sites that live up to our high design standards while affording us the ability to integrate more engaging and dynamic features (like animations and video elements) using time that would have previously been budgeted for back-end coding.

At the end of the day, the no-code web building movement does not provide a replacement to coding websites from scratch. Large-scale projects and other special circumstances will always benefit from a ground-up approach to web development, but the range of customization available through low-code web applications like Elementor can be a great answer to many web design challenges. 

At Haneke Design, using Elementor for low-code website development has proven advantageous to both our business and our customers. It allows us to offer a wide array of customization options and affords us the time to focus on the unique needs of each of our clients. Contact us today to find out more about our web design services!