Phil There’s a new kid on the web-design block calling itself “The Grid(io)” – and it has a lot of hype. It promises to build your website for you using “Artificial Intelligence” and “Robots” – and that it will save you hours of time by not needing to worry about the nitty-gritty parts of your website. If you’d like to see the advertisement in question, it’s here.
Basically, their advertising makes it seem like you just put all of your content on a USB stick, throw it at a computer, and out will come a beautiful website – which will be everything you ever dreamed of and more! Literally, the sell line is: “Wouldn’t it be better if websites just made themselves?”.
Is this possible? Maybe. But it brings to mind something Dad used to tell me:
“Son, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” – My Dad
Lets take a step back for a moment and look at this for what it really is – an advertisement. It’s an advertisement that simultaneously attacks services like Squarespace and WordPress (for being template-based) while presenting itself as a sort of “Second Coming” of web design.
Its cleverly worded verbiage almost convinced me that things I formally thought were downfalls of a WordPress theme – are actually somehow bonuses with “The Grid”:
These are “The Grid”‘s main selling points:
- You can’t put things where you want them. Robots do it.
- You can’t choose your own font. Robots do it.
- You can’t choose the size/placement of your images. Robots do it.
- And so on. You can’t choose display option “X”. Robots will choose that for you now.
Now, call me crazy, but those aren’t the selling points (or the robots/droids) I’m looking for.
Is “The Grid” all that different from WordPress?
Even with WordPress (Or even Squarespace, Wix, or “The Grid“), another thing to consider is that most of the time spent working on your website isn’t coding or messing with layouts. No matter your website’s foundation, most of the time is spent creating content.
Most “website time” is spent doing things like:
- Getting great Photography (by taking it or finding/buying Stock Photos)
- Creating an awesome Promo Video
- Writing great blogs and text content
- Posting your latest product to your store
- Keeping your website’s event calendar up to date
Don’t let the advertisement fool you: this stuff takes time. I can guarantee “The Grid” will not do that stuff for you – nor will it be faster than WordPress or any other system. But according to the ad, it feels like that stuff will do itself too. If it was truly as easy as they make it sound, it would. After all, “Website’s should make themselves” right? Wrong. People make content – and websites ARE content. All of the “robots” in the world won’t make you good and unique content. It’s what separates humans from robots (at least for now).
Truth be told, “The Grid” doesn’t seem all that different from a pre-designed WordPress Theme (other than the fact that you have more control over your WordPress theme – especially if it uses MP Stacks – or, heck, even some of the other great Page Building Plugins for WordPress out there).
If there’s one main thing I’ve learned about people building websites in my over 10 years of doing web design, making themes, and developing plugins, it’s that people WANT control over their website. They want to be able to move their things around as they see fit – not a robot making those choices for them. At the beginning of WordPress Themes, themes were intended to be what The Grid is: something you never have to “mess with”, that looks great, and can accept your content: and they generally still are exactly that. But even with Themes, people want more control. They want to be able to do stuff like use a font of their own choosing. With “The Grid”, Robots do that for you now.
Basically, it seems like you’ll be paying a lot of money to have LESS control over your site and get a design/layout that you may or may not love – and have no control over making it your own – other than asking “the robots” for something new and hoping they spit out perfection.
I’m not trying to bash a new idea. This really could be the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe it isn’t too good to be true. But it never hurts to take a step back and realize you are watching an advertisement tooting its own horn. I still strongly believe that WordPress is the best website solution out there. It has years of testing behind it, a HUGE, talented, passionate, and committed community, and is constantly being upgraded – literally daily. It isn’t a flash in the pan and it won’t be gone tomorrow with your cash in its pocket.
My desire with this blog post is just to shine a realistic light on some extremely cleverly worded (and a bit over-the-top) advertising before everybody throws their websites off a cliff without looking first.
Very good points. The lack of being able to have control over your site is exactly what I’ve been concerned with when it comes to The Grid. Thank you for sharing your opinions and the good review.
Thanks for your feedback. It will be interesting to see how it plays out for their customers if/when they launch.
But you never actually made a website with The Grid? You just wrote a review based on their advertisement? Hardly useful
Hey there, thanks for your follow-up questions to this blog for more clarity. This blog post is actually intended to be a review of their advertising and a break-down of their advertised promises. They advertise having less options/control available. For some people, having less options/control over their website is a good thing. For many others, it is not. That is really what this post is designed to outline.
On a side note, unfortunately for their customers, they have already failed to deliver their product when they said they would. They’ve postponed their launch several times already and are almost a year behind when they initially said they would launch.
If you have any other questions or comments I’d be happy to answer them!
True…but I am a “Founding Member” of TheGrid and was finally allowed into the Beta…I was not impressed…granted it was beta and they are promising more “commercialization”, but they don’t have an automatic social broadcasting yet or any of the other things that WordPress does well with plugins.
The AI functionality right now is limited to analyzing an image you submit and developing a color scheme from it. This was marginal at best with the 3 images I tried it with (one was colorful, one was muted, and one used essentially 2 hues)…Again, it is still in beta, so things may improve, but I was disappointed so far. I may change my tune, but right now I won’t be renewing my ‘subscription’ and will continue to build with WordPress.
Well in my opinion, the grid ‘s system of having a robot do it for you isn’t all that bad. I’ve started building websites recently using platforms such as Wix and WordPress and to my experience getting details such as the typography and colors right can be a bit challenging to get them right. If the grid is going to offer an easier way to make the process faster, smoother or at least point me in the right direction then its a welcomed feature for me.
On a side note, what you’re going to be paying, for the annual subscription is worth it considering you’ll be getting 7 websites (domains) plus hosting. Other platforms like Wix offer 1 domain for the same price.
Hey there, definitely the idea of having a robot create a perfect website for you is a nice idea – I can agree with the sentiment there. However, in practice, it will be interesting to see if it’s as smooth as it sounds or not. What happens if/when the robots create a design that is ugly to you? You have no controls over anything yourself. I think a better solution might be to have these robots create a design for you, and then give you controls to alter it as you see fit from there. But that isn’t the model here – they want to give you absolutely no control over design and layout. To each their own of course. If they ever launch, it will be interesting to see how it works (they have missed their own launch deadlines several times now)
It is now February 2016. The Grid is not only well over a year late (it was supposed to be out late spring 15, the summer then fall… anyone detect a pattern? I’ve had the “beta” a month or more. It operates worse than the worst templated web I’ve ever used.
I can’t resize photos. I have three logos that can’t be shown in their entirety that thegrid feels comfortable just showing the middle third of them. One would think at least specifications would be listed as to what size give what yield. Eg., I know with a google ad banners have to be 300 x 1200 or they are too small and won’t post or too big and will get cut off. You can move photos vertically but not horizontally. There is no centralized packet of info to walk you through using it except some really weak tutorial documents. Centralized only because they are all that exist.
The worst part as if anything could be worse is there is virtually no customer service. For instance, if you have a problem with Fatcow and call you immediately get attention.
And if you don’t bog down the memory your computer/laptop, etc., by keeping your photos (I have nearly 8,000) on line then too bad for you. You have to download your photos to your computer, then upload to thegrid instead of downloading to thegrid from Gdrive or gphotos, or flickr or whatever.
I’ve lost customers, prospective contracts, time and face. There is nothing to suggest they won’t string folks out another year.
Ouch! So sorry to hear you’ve had to go through that with your projects :/ Maybe I’m biased, but I still can’t see anyone making a better web-building system than WordPress. It’s got such a great community built around free, open-source code. I believe it’s tough to beat that with ANY proprietary system. All the best to you!
We tried it and it didn’t impress. It was harder to set up and we never saw anything come together the way it was presented in the video.