After just over two months of working with Nicepage, I remain enthusiastic about the program, after having bad experiences with MobiRise and PineGrow. I realize that maturing such a complex program requires time and effort. After all it has managed to allow website designers to break away from the restrictive blocks, object and element positioning of the bootstrap based programs, which is no small feat. In addition it has brought an interface that makes it ridiculously easy to learn how to use the program within a brief period of time, besides adding a ton of functions, like animation of images, icons and shapes that allows to create webpages of a different level. The integration with CMS systems like WordPress and its open source equivalent Joomla make it applicable to a much wider range of websites. Particularly since both systems support a ton of plugins, like ecommerce, that makes building web shops possible. In today's lockdowns and restrictive access to public provisions, creating online sales points have become a lifeline for many.
Click the image to visit the Nicepage website |
The minor flaws that I have run into, will be corrected really fast, I'm sure, because I have noticed that the support department on their forum page responds quickly, which probably results in the high update pace of the program. Communication with the mods on the Nicepage forum is done from within the program as well, by the way, which is quite a useful feature. Since I started to use it approximately 2 months ago, there have been some 5 updates, all of which can be installed from within the program, while offering the possibility to back up the created sites before updating. I did not have to use this option, because the updates did not cause any problems, which hints at the fact that the developers do some sound testing before releasing the updates. All in all, these are positive experiences some of which I haven't encountered while using other programs that I used previously. So, for me, switching to Nicepage was a perfectly on the mark decision.
Updating Nicepage from within the program |
The minor flaws I referred to in the previous paragraph concerned to sometimes fiddly positioning of elements (text and images), in automated fluid repositioning of them in laptop, tablet and mobile devices resolutions and screen orientation. With some trial and error these can all be corrected quite easily however. Other programs I used, preform much worse in this department. Note: making sites work for display on multiple screen resolutions and orientations in an environment that is more complex than the popular, but restrictive object positioning bootstrap method, is quite an achievement. An other weird flaw I encountered, is the colouring of the bullets in a bulleted list, that strangely enough works on Opera's android vertical webpages for mobile devices, but not in the desktop versions of Opera and other browsers. Bearing in mind the proven prowess of the Nicepage developers, however, this is an oddity that they should easily be able to correct.
In the near future I plan to test Nicepage in combination with Joomla to add ecommerce functionality to a website. This will have to be done in a sub-domain that I will need to create, since my own site does not require the use of Joomla. Stay tuned to learn of my experiences with this type of web site building.
Another nice feature of Nicepage are the Animation options, that allows designers to draw the attention of the website visitors to a particular area of the page. These all work flawlessly and are fully customizable. It shows the attention to details of the developers that really understand the needs of designers.
Animating images and icons etc. in Nicepage |
The Nicepage Mega Menu |