We use Sitecore where I work. It’s a pretty good CMS, and our site is big enough and complex enough, that something like Squarespace or WordPress would instantly break down. Not necessarily break down technically, but conceptually, the hierarchy we have would break down in a simple CMS.

But why does the individual page builder have to be so god damn awful? It’s modular, so if you know exactly what you want (within the rigid confines of the system), it’s relatively simple to plug some content in to the predefined modules. Widgets (spots in the Sitecore parlance) can easily be used on several pages, and be updated centrally. It’s all very good for such a huge site (probably thousands of individual pages, though I don’t know for sure). It’s just incredibly cumbersome, ugly, and uninspiring. And you have almost no concept of how the page you’re making actually looks.

To be honest. WordPress is not that much better. It’s a lot better looking. Almost ridiculously better. The content editor is quite good (and very easy to replace if you disagree) and the full screen mode makes it very easy to get rid of the distractions. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is enough to make WordPress great for actual writing. But constructing a new page is still cumbersome and hard for the visually creative.

Squarespace

The poster child for this is Squarespace. The page builder in Squarespace 6 is second to none, when it comes to creating a page, while actually getting af pretty good idea of the result. For a creatively minded person, it is a lot easier to feel inspired by Squarespace’s approach with different kinds of blocks, that can be moved around freely.

The templates seem less flexible, or at least less easy to heavily modify, than in Squarespace 5. However, once your overall site design is in place, the pages are incredibly easy to work with, and the page builder is very visual.

I find it a LOT easier to write copy, when I can get a feel for the context. It makes the final site feel more cohesive because the writing is written with a clear idea of where it needed to go.

This is all pretty much irrelevant for writing articles and blog posts, but for most other kinds of pages, I think it makes a real difference to many people.

I think it’s the same way some people feel about writing a letter in Microsoft Word vs. doing it in Text Edit on the Mac or Windows Notepad (or Writeroom, BBEdit, Writemonkey, or any other plain text editor). Some people need the context of the “page” to feel like they’re writing a letter.

In that context, I’ll take the plain text, but I do get the appeal of word processors for stuff that will eventually end up on paper. Writing in the context the text will be used can be a lot easier sometimes.