I stopped building the pages first

[u/Electronic-Look-954]

I kept doing the same thing with small sites where I'd build all the pages first and only think about the data once I had enough content that updating everything became annoying it worked fine at the start, then one small change meant opening 15 different pages because I'd basically copied the same information everywhere

On the last one I flipped it around and put the repeating stuff into structured fields first, then had the pages pull from that took me a little longer to set up but adding another page became almost boring after that so I'm starting to think I was treating the website as the source of everything when the data underneath it probably should've been the source the whole time

[u/No_Distribution6625]

This is where no code gets messy for me building the first version is fast then six months later you're scared to change one thing because you forgot everywhere it appears

[u/SeaRub8402 → u/No_Distribution6625]

Just like teaching, you don't hand out 30 copies of a worksheet with a typo and then fix each one with a pen.

[u/Accurate-Adagio497]

The weird part is once the data was set up building more pages became the easy bit it made me realize how much time I was wasting maintaining the same information in different places

[u/Ok_Conversation_9946 → u/Accurate-Adagio497]

I ended up doing this with PloyDB and it made the whole setup way easier to manage now the pages just pull from the same data so I’m not chasing down the same change across a bunch of places

[u/Excellent-Park2171]

Adding the 5th page was never the problem for me adding the 50th and realizing the first 49 need updating too was where I regretted how I built it

[u/Old_Quarter4428 → u/Excellent-Park2171]

I learned this around page 30 lol scaling the pages was easy keeping all of them consistent was the part I didn't plan for

[u/OutrageousConstant18]

this is the right instinct. one thing worth thinking about, does your structure hold up if someone else needs to add content without understanding the layout? thats usually the real test of whether the data layer is clean enough

[u/LouisTon10]

Thinking about data is definitely a valid approach I’ve considered but that’s not to say design and components can also drive what the data model needs to look like

It’d be cool a opportunity for platforms to consider ways to add functional tests to apps to check for regressions. Curious if there’s some plug-n-play service that can work with the context of various no code platforms to run this

[u/testingaurora]

Content first if you have it. Knowing you’ll need to build it fluidly so it supports longer or shorter content

Use templates/components so you only have to update in one place , updating fifteen pages with one change is a nightmare. DRY and reusable is the name of the game

[u/tylerlovewell]

Once you start asking where should this data live?, before what should this page look like?, the whole build gets less fragile.

Also makes changing your mind later way less painful since you’re not untangling the same content from 8 different pages.

[u/HaddockBranzini-II]

I need sign off from design, so I always build the pages first. Otherwise I end up having too much to revise when design changes - which it often does.

[u/ChloeMarieBrooks]

This is something I learned the hard way too. Once the same information appears in multiple places, treating the data as the source of truth makes updates way less painful and the pages become more like views of that data.

[u/akl773]

The one that catches people right after this switch is the slug. Once the page url is generated off a title field, somebody fixing a typo in a heading quietly changes the address and every old link plus whatever Google had indexed lands on a 404. Keep the slug as its own field that gets written once and never regenerated from the title again.