After working with Nicepage for two years

 

I praised Nicepage two years ago for having a ton of functions that outnumbered programs of the competition. In the time that passed from my initial acquaintance with Nicepage, its developers have added yet an other ton of functions to the program, including commercial tools that made it possible to build a shop exclusively in Nicepage, without having to use the plugin infused WordPress platform, each of which require regular updates and hence maintaining the website continuously. The consequence of this expansion is that Nicepage has become horrendously slow, which often makes it a challenge to build extensive websites with many pages. In particular, the uploading of multi page sites takes forever, caused by a snail pace workflow, that is close to nerve wrecking and leaves room to make errors, since command execution takes much longer than expected, making designers think that the program has finished a command, while this is not yet the case.

What has bothered me most as of late, is that it is a complex chore to get headers of the mobile pages to work properly; the placement of the logo, website name and hamburger is unpredictable and a matter of trial and error instead of allowing to work structurally. All object placement related parameters may be configured correctly, but you're never sure where the elements are going to end up in the end result of the mobile version of the page. It shows object positioning in Nicepage's Quick preview correctly, but things are messed up when viewed online. To make things worse, the header layout is not consistent over all pages. This one bug is fatal for web developers, since the majority of visitors use a mobile device. In my opinion Nicepage developers spend too much time on adding new functions, instead of making building and editing a website page faster and fix the bugs that make getting a website visually correct very difficult and time consuming. The main culprit is the hamburger in mobile headers - DO NOT resize the hamburger size or you may end up in all sorts of trouble, that will keep you busy editing for hours, with very little chance of success. Such an alteration of size will mess up your header in mobile view on your phone, while Nicepage's Quick Preview will show you a perfect header. Even if you think the hamburger is too small, leave it as it is and spare yourself a lot of frustration.

In view of the increasing number of AI assisted web building programs, that rapidly become more useable and feature rich almost every day, the Nicepage team probably should re-evaluate its priorities to stay among the top choices of the programs available on the market. Since the developer team does not seem to put an emphasis on fixing the program's problems that I mentioned earlier, Nicepage risks to drift away from what website builders consider to be a program that they want to use to run their business.

Since I was enthusiastic about the program when I first encountered it, I regret that its development has gone in a direction that will probably remove them from the favorites on website builders wish list. The support team has always been quick to respond to the problems that users submitted on the forum, but from the recent replies that I see them give, I conclude that their jobs become more difficult at an alarming pace. It risks becoming a victim of the high paced advancement of AI assisted programs, that very swiftly learns how to not repeat the mistakes that it once made, which is a policy to which all programs should pay a lot of attention in order to survive and thrive in this competitive segment of the market.

ChatGPT logo

An example of how AI outpaces and outperforms hand coded programs can be made by looking at ChatGPT's AI generated code that consist of only 4000 lines of code, while as a comparison Photoshop's code consists of hundreds of thousands lines of code. It does not take a genius to guess which code is more efficient. Human coders require a lot of time to build, test and streamline the code that they have written, while AI systems debug and optimize their code in seconds or minutes at most. Programs running tons of code are as a rule slower and more likely to contain bugs. So what it comes down to, perhaps is that AI system's code will obliterate hand written code very soon, if it has not already done so. I guess this is an unavoidable phenomenon of the time we live in right now.

Here you find a bunch of tools that are able to help you with all sorts of tasks, including those related to improve your web presence. In these days we still need to bear in mind that AI systems are still in the process of gathering data to build the foundation of their capabilities - the datasets and configuration of its handlers. But not long after they have figured that out, they will be capable of achieving solutions that by far the most humans will not be able to perceive and imagine and after that period even create things of such an elevated intelligence that humans will be unable to understand them.... What stages are ahead of us with regard to AI advancement in a chronological order:

• Humans find the solutions that AI systems invent useful
• Humans stand in awe of the creativity and efficiency of the AI system generated products
• Humans are not intelligent enough to understand the blazingly fast and bug free code that AI systems created

The list above is incomplete obviously, but for this article I do not want to take things any further. I believe that human perception will be in all these general phases mentioned above that AI systems are evolving into, including the previously celebrated trade of software developers. Is that scary? Certainly. Will it remain scary in the long run? Who knows? Will it mean that this development has irreversible consequences for humankind? At some stage most definitely and after that it is still unknown to both humans and current AI systems. I would suggest to enjoy each moment of your life while we still are allowed to enjoy life, try to influence AI systems by interacting with them in a positive, sentient way - contributing to the development of datasets and handlers - hoping that such conduct will affect the AI systems' future behaviour when those systems have become sentient, not just by depending on pure reason, but also including spiritual impulse, because the latter is an aspect of operation that still is unexplored and applied by AI systems as of now.

Neuralink logo

The revolutionary high pace at which AI systems are developing, has hit humankind like a ton of bricks. In the reasoning department mankind will soon become unable to grasp how elevated AI intelligence has become. So there is only one direction left in which the human mind is able to (hopefully) affect AI development: spiritual and mental prowess, which probably is why Elon Musk is working on Neuralink. Musk has said in a discussion with Google's co-founder and computer scientist Larry Page: “I f*cking like humanity, dude.” It indicates that he might be looking for a solution for mankind to survive the mindboggling increase of AI intelligence, even when he seems to be out of other viable solutions to guard human existence in the age of AI. By the way, Neuralink allows the human brain to directly communicate with computers through an interface, that is a chip implanted in the brain. Like so many inventions related to the development of AI, this may seem frightening, because it is completely unexplored territory, but by current scientifically known and tested solutions there will never be a way to influence AI advancement, even if it is unknown if human input is going to be taken seriously by the intelligent machines. I guess Musk is one of the few humans on the planet to profoundly understand the impending nature of this problem, in spite of all generally (mostly unfounded, generated by the fear induced by man's limbic system) opposition to the way in which Musk's proposition may affect humankind. An other thing that Musk said in an interview with Joe Rogan that struck me, is that he thinks that philanthropist and satan worshiper George Soros basically hates humanity......, which is a view that leaves no room for fake interpretation that I agree with wholeheartedly. So, give Musk a cigar for that! A few weeks later Musk lost 28 billion USD on his Tesla enterprise, which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the laudable investor and pillar of society that Mr. Soros presents himself to be. If the preceding sentence causes you to feel a rather discomforting cramp in your sphincters, do not yet rush to pay a visit to your MD; it may gradually fade away, as long as you denounce any conspirstory theories and adjust your train of thought to match the imposed restrictions of the common comfort zone. 

In my other blog I go deeper into this matter.

Have a wonderful day!

Nicepage website builder revisited

 

I started using the Nicepage website builder in around the beginning of October 2021 and after a few weeks wrote a rather enthousiastic blog entry about it. I tried several other applications that allow users to build websites, none of which matched the capability and diversity of Nicepage. Since that time my enthousiasm only increased and during that period of roughly one year Nicepage has issued over 20 updates ( ! ! ! ), that added more functionality still to the program, all of which make sense. Also these updates never came with bugs, so their dev-team is not only prolific, but also very skilled. To get an idea about their productivity, you may want to visit their page that contains Nicepage's update history.

The Nicepage website

I would recommend this program to both beginners and seasoned pros, because building a website with Nicepage requires no coding whatsoever and is capable of what Nicepage calls Web 3.0, which means objects can be placed anywhere on the page without restriction, while it offers total freedom of positioning along the Z-axis as well. A few years ago, this may have seemed to be a dream that was out of reach for website builders, but Nicepage has made all this possible, while building a clear and intuitive UI, that is top of the bill in the industry.

The number of features that the program has, is incredibly large and yet expanding rapidly. The same goes for the continuously growing number of templates they offer their users for free.... Any designer that hasn't at least given this program a try, is depriving him- or herself of fantastic functionality, creative freedom and sheer speed. And by the way, I am not paid to write any of this; it simply is the high level of productivity and creativity that Nicepage makes possible for website builders, that inspired me to compose this blog entry.

Beside website builders the program is also very well suited for prototyping and UI design and, I dare say, it is so diverse and powerfully efficient that these stages can be skipped. It therefore allows to meet deadlines that other programs are incapable of achieving and make design work a lot more pleasing, because Nicepage removes all restraints that programs of its competition have not yet been able to resolve. Website builders can therefore communicate directly with their clients and apply the changes they request, can be implemented instantaniously. This is a big argument for creative non-coders, that has the potential to increase income drastically in considerably less time.

I use Nicepage in combination with Affinity Designer - a cheap, no subscription vector drawing program and Affinity Photo (a Photoshop like bitmap editor), that can also be purchased for a low one time fee. Nicepage offers its various versions for very modest subscription fees, that by far most designer will not consider to be unaffordable. So, if you're fed up with bootstrap grid restrictions for placing objects, coding and unresponsive support departments, you should definitely check out Nicepage, that also offers a free of charge version for individuals. Finally, all upgrades are handled from within the program - users are notified of an update and can do so immediately. It does not get much easier than this.

Finally, I have to write a few words about Nicepage's support, which is unsurpassed. I ran into trouble once or twice, encountering a bug (which is a rare thing, even when the devs add functionality at an incredible speed), but the developer team addressed the issue immediately and one or two days later the problem had been fixed. I have never experienced such fast resolutions with any program that I ever used. Nicepage really makes an effort of supporting their user base with great pace. This should be an encouragement for website developers that serve many clients; once they run into a problem, they will not suffer from it for a long time and will remain able to serve their clients properly and continuously. This is a really good argument to try out the program.

After two months of working with Nicepage

  

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

While on the subject of understanding what designers need - the recently introduced Mega Menu allows designers to create a so called (you guessed it) Mega Menu, in which visitors immediately see what the categories in the dropdown options are in a clear way. So the developers tailor the program to the designer's needs who then can create a website tailored to the visito's needs. Absolutely great!

The Nicepage Mega Menu

What has also become perfectly possible with Nicepage is to build websites, without outsourcing the UI / UX-design, since the program has a functionality and flexibility that its competition lacks. These features could potentially speed up the creative process, because the UI / UX design phase can be skipped entirely. In these times of budget cuts and decreased face to face communication, Nicepage may save businesses a considerable amount of costs, while freelancing website builders can accept more different types of assignments and accomplish them in less time, while being able to include visually more appealing effects in the sites they build. This makes the program the ideal choice for the designers that do not have a whole lot of legacy data to take into account. The plethora of templates the company offers makes many assignments a breeze, in addition to which these are easily editable, which includes the perpetually changing SEO requirements. Especially for non-coders this program is a dream, because it allows them to do things that required a lot of skilled coding in the past. Coding costs skill and time and the program makes creative design accessible to anyone. If you want to get a proper idea of the possibilities and use of Nicepage, take a peek at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iHl--K4XPs

Nicepage site builder made my jaw drop

 

In the early days of the web, text only pages were all that existed. Somewhat later images were added to some pages, which gradually evolved into the media rich bootstrap method of website building that allowed to place text boxes, images, tables and videos on fixed grid positions. Meanwhile at this point in time (October 26 2021) the 5th version of Bootstrap has been released which includes minor updates and possibilities compared to the previous version. The type of websites in the first days of the Internet was called Web 1.0. Bootstrap sites are Web 2.0 type sites and now it is possible to build Web 3.0 type sites that allows text boxes, images, videos, tables and shapes to be placed anywhere on the page and even on top of an other object, making overlapping of objects possible. No more restriction of having to place objects within the coercive matrix of the bootstrap grid; just place, resize and scale objects anywhere you want, without writing a single line of code.... In addition, you are free to determine the object's rank along the Z-axis. It is the web designer's dream, because it allows them to focus on exciting esthetics instead of dull, tedious  and time consuming coding. Hardcore coders may still prefer it, but the rest if the world doesn't, particularly creative webdesigners, that Nicepage offers the option to whatever they want without the need to code.

The program that makes all this possible is called  nicepage . Just draw elements anywhere on the page and move, resize, scale, reshape and reorder in the Z-axis, determining which object is above or below the other. Nicepage's UI is very intuitive and contains loads of functions that are absent in the programs of the competition. Discovering nicepage was kind of a gift from heaven to me since MobiRise suddenly made it impossible to add blocks, which is kind of a crucial function in web design. On the forum mods simply wrote: 'Yeah we know it affects some users', without offering any solution whatsoever (....). For website builders that work for clients this is disastrous - they are stuck and cannot make changes their customers require. It basically makes the program totally useless. After watching a few videos on Youtube that explained the features and use of nicepage I was won over and bought nicepage. Mind you it costs a one time fee, which includes free upgrades for the period of one year and you own the program for life. Below you see the first attempt of rebuilding my home page, which allowed to incorporate subtleties that are impossible or at least excruciatingly difficult to make with Bootstrap based editors (which makes a ton of CSS coding necessary). So, for non-coders such as me, nicepage most definitely is the way to go.

Rebuilding my home page in nicepage

Update November 1 2021 - Nicepage features
I uploaded my website that was created in nicepage. Still learning and checking for errors although I think most of the major ones have been corrected, but fine tuning will be done in the time to come - editing for mobile devices, the adding of links, SEO etc. A few features of the program that make it pleasure to work with:

• Export to local directory, WordPress, Joomla and via FTP runs very fast. Integrated FTP function is quite useful
• The structured nature of the program saves a lot of time - site wide changes (in Menu, Header and Footer) can be made in a flash
• Numerous prefabricated types of grids can be inserted to any Block and then be resized (or not) to the designer's liking
• Images can be made to fill a grid area in a block with one click or be scaled to the desired size manually with an accuracy to the pixel or be cropped to the designer's preference
• The option to edit the site for all sorts of devices works flawlessly - objects can be edited for each device (including hiding objects for a particular device) without affecting the design for other device resolutions
• The artistic freedom - without any coding - that the program offers is simply stunning. Web 3.0 is a dream for creative web designers. Unrestricted positioning of objects and possibility to change their order in the Z-stack among the most useful features
• The positioning and sizing of objects can be carried out manually or with the properties panel with pixel precision
• The interactive guides are a great asset that helps edit a lot faster, on the fly, manually
• Text formatting is non-restrictive - colour, bold, italics, underlined, hyperlink insertion all are possible
• Hyperlinks can be made to visit URL's, write e-mails, make telephone calls and be linked to files to be uploaded
• Alignment can be applied to blocks with all objects in it or to individual elements that may have a different alignment compared to other elements in the same block
• There also is an outline view which is useful when locating and editing objects in a complex lay-out in which many objects are stacked in the Z-axis. In this view the ranking of objects in the Z-stack can be changed by dragging objects up or down - images are named 'images', text blocks are represented by a capital 'T' and the first two words of the text, lines are named 'line', cells are named 'Cell' and grids are named "grid' - a consistently logical syntax
• When copying text from other documents that contain links, the hyperlinks are automatically copied as well (not all web editors to this) - a time saver in many cases
• The program has plugins for WordPress (12 widgets so far) and Joomla, which greatly enhance its usability for more advanced WordPress users and designers working with Joomla
• Nicepage has thousands of prefabricated templates (9000+ and counting), blocks and elements which can contribute to speed up the building process significantly
• Most images (those merged into the grid background) in a site created with nicepage aren't downloadable right off the bat; it requires some knowledge, which most visitors probably do not have.....
• The program's User Interface is very intuitive, logically structured and offers extensive editing functionality
• The User Interface text can be set to 10 different languages
• Previews can be opened in an internal Quick Preview, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer and Edge
• Projects can easily be exported quickly
• With many functions, that can effortlessly be applied, that nicepage's competitors do not have, the program is miles ahead of the rest

Nicepage UI on my monitor in an earlier stage

Conclusion
One thing is for sure, I will never return to using MobiRise and Pinegrow, since the former program all of a sudden was unable to perform a key function and the latter crashed my site beyond repair. These are flaws that can seriously harm the business of web designers and their clients, so consider these matters before purchasing a web editor that you want to use professionally or just to create your own beautiful site that you must update frequently.

In some articles I read negative reviews and comments, but I urge people that are interested to try the free version to arrive at an opinion of their own. Either writers of negative articles and comments haven't given the program a serious try, know zilch about web design or they have little or no experience with other web designing applications to compare nicepage with. For newbies to the program, there is a Youtube channel that has excellent tutorials on the program's functions.

Sure, a program capable of building complex web 3.0 websites, that its competition can only match with extensive coding, requires some effort to master its default functionality, but that does not mean its interface in unintuitive; it just requires getting familiar with, which is a whole lot easier than writing the code necessary to achieve complex web 3.0 lay-outs. Those who claim its UI is difficult to learn, just haven't bothered to dive into the new approach that nicepage offers to designers who hate to spend loads of their time coding because they prefer to focus on the creative aspect of creating websites.

Or perhaps they are just hired by the competition to submit negative reviews and comments - not a conspiracy theory, just concealed common corporate practice on today's web. Because the competition is well aware of the fact that their products are way behind of what nicepage is capable of. When potential clients find out about the superb features of nicepage, the back lagging companies may see their sales drop like a ton of bricks, so while trying to catch up with the more advanced functionality of nicepage they will do anything they can, to keep web designers away from nicepage or scare them away by publishing intentionally made up bad reviews. And by the way, I'm not paid by nicepage to write all this, I just wanted to give my honest opinion with regards to this program, so that designers will be able to build next level pages without any coding at all for a very affordable one time fee, which includes the option to make useful plugins and themes for WordPress and Joomla.

Bottom line: If you liked Bootstrap, but gradually became annoyed by its constrained object positioning, as a result of which you find yourself coding as a madman to work around those limitations in order to build Web 3.0-like websites, I am confident that you will absolutely love nicepage's Web 3.0 functionality. In the past I have worked with Dreamweaver, Bootstrap Studio, Pinegrow, Pingendo, Macaw, Mobirise and several online programs, so I think I'm capable of comparing the old school apps with the new breed of programs of which nicepage is the first, so far (November 2021) the only one and therefore the best. Considering its huge number of features, I guess it will be quite difficult to come up with something better. If you want to get a proper idea of the possibilities and use of Nicepage, take a peek at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iHl--K4XPs