No code
Last year at Phillips we created a new division of the business with the goal to sell art in the middle market. Limited editions of works that could be easily purchased without auction. There’s a pickle of systems in auction businesses and building an ecom platform from scratch or deeply integrating one would have delayed go to market time beyond feasibility. We championed for Shopify, lightly integrated with existing payment services. More interestingly, we constrained the design of the experience to only using Shopify’s core theme Dawn, no-code and no front-end engineers. This prevented the project taking Engineer time away from critical auction projects, zeroed out any contractor costs and allowed the Experience Design & Research team to move fast autonomously. You can visit the shop here.
This planted the seed for me to finally visit WordPress no code for my self-initiated projects. For the last few years I’d been ignoring WordPress updates. I’m very much stuck in time when it comes to making webpages. This current site is all designed in Figma and then I spend way too long trying to achieve the designs using my outdated front end knowledge and ACF layouts. I’m always scared that if I open the door to modern techniques I will spend all my time experimenting and learning without publishing anything remotely close to the designs.
I created a new press over at https://playground.lawrencebrown.eu/ and I’ve been watching the talented Jamie Marshall on his channel to wrap my head around the model, controls and workflow to build and design what I want. I came across Jamie via Matt Mullenweg’s blog post where Jamie rebuilds TechCrunch in 30 minutes using the no code approach. My plan is to keep putting the time into the styles and templates to the point I can transfer over a no code build to this primary url.
It’ll be extraordinary to see where no code solutions get to in the next few years. The market competition and feature set is really strong, blogging and self hosting is growing again each year and I do start to wonder how much the code side of my skills really matter now. Perhaps, its knowing just enough that I can add those few lines of modifications each time that I get exactly what I intended but with only managing snippets not tens of code files.
Finally, it gets me wondering, when this url is running no code, what will I be trying out in my playground subdomain area?
