In June of 2024 I was sitting at a table in Torino Italy, surrounded by my team. We were in Torino for WCEU, but with the explicit goal of getting serious about our plans for Etch.
My main message to the team at this meeting was, “We can not and will not build a conventional page builder just to see if we can do it better.”
For a full two years prior to that, I had fended off dozens and dozens of requests to create a new page builder for WordPress.
People were hyped about what my team and I had already brought to the WP ecosystem: free high-level education (hundreds of hours), a very vocal call for higher standards in WordPress web development (year after year), and two innovative products (Automatic.css and Frames).
They wanted us to create a new page builder as our next product, but I had zero motivation to do so. The answers I gave were direct.
“No.”
“No again.”
“Still no.”
I liked the idea of creating a page builder, but I didn’t want to commit to creating a product that I didn’t have a clear vision for.
Sure, I had 100 different ideas for how page builders could be better. Way better, even.
But, “improvements” don’t fundamentally change the landscape of an industry and Digital Gravy is in the business of fundamental change.
How “No” Became “Yes.”
After two years of saying, “No,” I somewhat spontaneously DM’d my CTO, Matteo, and said, “We’re going to do this. Let’s plan it at WCEU.”
Even though I say “no” to something, it continues to rattle around in my head. I might like the idea of it, but I can’t move forward if I can’t see the big picture.
Creating products is like putting a puzzle together. If you want to create a slightly better product, you just put the pieces together like the picture on the box because someone else already figured out what the picture is supposed to look like. Then you tweak a few things and go to market.
If you’re going to truly innovate, though, you need a completely new picture.
To make things even harder, you have to figure out what the new pieces are going to be and how they’re going to fit together, but with everyone else’s 500 piece puzzle dumped on the table you’re trying to work at.
Oh, and you’re not just looking for any new pieces at this point. New pieces by themselves won’t help you understand the big picture.
What you’re really looking for as you sift through these pieces is the “domino” piece. The domino piece is the piece that knocks the others into place.
In early 2024 I found the domino piece sitting right there within the most basic question about product creation: “Who are page builders designed for?”
The answer to this question, and a realization about this answer, knocked all the other pieces into place for me. That’s how my “No” became a “Yes.”
Who are page builders designed for?
Anyone who has followed my YouTube channel for any length of time, especially people who have watched my livestreams, has heard a quality rant about page builders.
Tools like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg, and almost all other page builders frustrated me to no end for years.
Here I am trying to do professional work, and teach professional standards, and every tool around me is doing and promoting the opposite.
Why????
And then I accepted it. These tools are not designed for me! They’re designed for people who don’t know what they’re doing.
They’re designed for one purpose: to try and make everything easy for laypeople. That’s why they violate basic web design principles, lack critical features, have zero maintainability or scalability processes, output terrible code, and frustrate competent users to no end.
Every frustrating feature and decision is completely explainable! “We did it that way because that’s what we felt was best for laypeople.”
WordPress page builders (and you can throw Wix and Squarespace in there as well) suck not because the developers of these tools are incompetent, but because the developers are asking the wrong question.
If you want a different answer, ask a different question.
WordPress page builders ask, “How can we empower laypeople?”
Etch asks, “How can we empower professionals and aspiring professionals?”
That’s the domino that knocks everything else into place.
Designing for laypeople is why all page builders, even advanced builders, look the same and work the same.
It’s why they all prevent you from seeing and touching the code.
It’s why they prioritize beginner-friendly features and then messily try to backdoor advanced features in later.
It’s how you end up with “presets” instead of classes.
It’s how you end up with ID styling as the default.
It’s why you get a class system and not a true selector system.
Let’s just say it – it’s why everything in WordPress sucks for people like us.
We either choke down what page builder developers give us, or we retreat back to IDE-land where our workflow is spread out over three different interfaces and multiple languages.
These shouldn’t be our only options!
The Freedom to Innovate
“How can we empower professionals and aspiring professionals” is the domino piece that gave our team permission to do things radically different from how they’ve been done in the past.
For example, we initially thought that we’d need to at least make Etch’s interface look familiar to other page builders for the sake of user experience.
Nope, that was a terrible conclusion.
When you ask a question that nobody has asked yet, you can’t be afraid of the new answer. So, we gave ourselves permission to re-imagine a modern development interface.
What else sucks about page builders and WordPress? Magic Areas. This idea that if you want to do something really important or advanced, you have to leave the area you’re currently in and go to a new area to do this new work.
That’s a big picture puzzle piece. Etch will eliminate magic areas and replace them with inline workflows.
Need to create a CPT and custom fields? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in.
Need to add/manage media? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in.
Need to create/manage components and templates? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in.
Need to manage SEO? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in.
Need to optimize the page/site? Do it in the Etch window you’re already in.
Change pages? That might not be necessary at all. Maybe we just offer an infinite canvas where your entire site is available at all times.
Access and manipulate the HTML? Write HTML from scratch? Write PHP and JS? Manage selector styling and not just class styling? All these things are possible in Etch.
Pro-level looping instead of just ultra-basic loops? Of course.
It’s a dream come true for professionals and aspiring professionals and it all started with, “What would happen if…”
Is a smartphone a phone?
This post was a very long answer to the question, “Is Etch a page builder.”
If you prefer brevity, the question is best answered with another question: “Is a smartphone a phone?”
Imagine seeing a smartphone for the first time and asking, “What’s this?” And someone answers, “it’s a phone.” Does that help you grasp the new reality you’re living in?
Of course not.
When someone asks, “What’s Etch,” you’re doing the same disservice by answering, “It’s a page builder.”
Yes, it builds pages. But, it’s fundamentally and radically different from other page builders. It doesn’t look like other page builders, doesn’t force you into a traditional page builder workflow, does things that other page builders don’t do, and was designed with a completely different premise.
For this reason, Etch is best described as a Visual Development Environment. It takes the really awesome WYSIWYG part of page building and combines it with the power and efficiency of an IDE, while also incorporating everything else that’s necessary in a development and website management workflow.
Not only that, but it maps everything you do into core WordPress blocks within the block editor without any effort on your part, effectively liberating your data from the Etch interface and provides your client with a simple editing interface by default.
This empowers you, for the first time ever in WordPress, to build and do anything without limitation, from a single inline workflow, and without abandoning code and without abandoning WP core.
You can call that “a page builder” if you want, but it’s obviously something new, something different, and something far more powerful.