Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#1

Post by petecooper » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:55 AM UTC

I am returning to freelance website work after the end of a lengthy contract in an unrelated field. I am completely disconnected from current best practices on platforms & tools to build and maintain websites.

I have some local and national clients who have requested website overhauls, some from the ground up with a respectable budget (mostly national) and others under the single-page basic web presence umbrella with less money available (mostly local).

If you're a freelancer working with building & maintaining websites, I would like to know more about how you build and maintain them. What's in your toolkit? Server-side, front-side, desktop apps…anything goes.

Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#2

Post by CharlieDigital » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:18 PM UTC

I'm a big fan of Firebase. The local emulators make working with it really productive since you can iterate locally against the full stack very quickly. SSO and auth are easy to use; way easier than Cognito. For most clients, it will be virtually free to operate until they reach significant traffic. For your static front-ends, Firebase hosting is fully integrated into Google Cloud CDN with no extra setup. You can extend it to full Google Cloud if you need to (e.g. connect endpoints to Cloud Run if you have container workloads). The Firebase Functions integration is really, really nice and allows for strongly typed invocations if you are using TypeScript. Real time with Firestore is easy and, again, free for most small customers. You can use any FE engine with it - React, Vue, vanilla. The Web Frameworks integration with Functions lets you deploy dynamic backends as well into Cloud Functions.

If I need SEO, I'll build using a framework like Nuxt.js or Astro.js and statically generate the output and host in Firebase Hosting. If I don't need SEO, I'll build regular SPAs using React or Vue.

The overall DX is really good compared to Amplify (closest alternative).

Supabase is also promising if you want to work with a relational DB.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#3

Post by rglover » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

Joystick: https://cheatcode.co/joystick.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#4

Post by wheelerwj » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:22 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

I'm a big fan of Firebase. The local emulators make working with it really productive since you can iterate locally against the full stack very quickly. SSO and auth are easy to use; way easier than Cognito. For most clients, it will be virtually free to operate until they reach significant traffic. For your static front-ends, Firebase hosting is fully integrated into Google Cloud CDN with no extra setup. You can ext…

I kind of just assumed people were still using wordpress… especially for projects that require SEO.

Aren’t you having problems with clients wanting to update content on their own?

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#5

Post by philip1209 » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

The competition to coded websites is Webflow agencies. Webflow has made websites somewhat predictable to build, enabling agencies to offer flat-rate pricing.

I think a questions you should ask is "What are the client needs that no-code doesn't serve", and explore that. Or, "What are the technical needs for deploying an hybrid coded+low-code stack", e.g. setting up reverse proxies that combine multiple backends.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#6

Post by ecmascript » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

Altough not freelance, but I operate almost 10 websites atm. I use Remix on pretty much all of them since the dx is great and goes fast to develop more complex things. I host every site on one dedicated server from Hetzner with the Caddy webserver as a reverse proxy in front. I have super fast load times and a cheap monthly bill. I could 10x the traffic and it wouldn't be near hitting the limit of the server and it's like €18/month.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#7

Post by browningstreet » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

ecmascript wrote: post #6

Altough not freelance, but I operate almost 10 websites atm. I use Remix on pretty much all of them since the dx is great and goes fast to develop more complex things. I host every site on one dedicated server from Hetzner with the Caddy webserver as a reverse proxy in front. I have super fast load times and a cheap monthly bill. I could 10x the traffic and it wouldn't be near hitting the limit of the server and it's…

I do a lot of WP hosting and my recent anecdotal experience is that big-popular-named hosting service outperforms premium-tech-oriented hosting service. $15/month versus $125/month. I was shocked. Worked with premium service too, but they were not interested in delving. After 8+ years of being their customer.

Point is, for others — don’t automatically assume well reviewed premium ho$ting is what you need. It may, in fact, be a lot slower.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#8

Post by tommiegannert » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

My go-to right now is Typescript, Nuxt ("Next.js for VueJS"), PrimeVue and Supabase. I'm using Vuetify (Material Design toolkit) for an SPA, but PrimeVue is nice for general websites. Nuxt provides SSR/SSG and lets me use a single framework for both sides. All of the above naturally have quirks to get used to. ;)

If I write a backend, it's in Go. It has nice concurrency primitives that lets me structure code the way I want, and memory is managed safely. Using PostgreSQL to store things.

Hosting is with Firebase or on a Hetzner instance with Docker/Podman containers.

Edit: When on Hetzner: using Traefik as a reverse proxy to handle authentication and TLS.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#9

Post by michelb » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

For marketing sites: Wordpress with a custom theme,ACF, and some other plugins, with WP-Rocket, behind a WAF. Integrate it with whatever service the client uses.

Then hand it over or maintain it for them.

Lately I have been using Framer which is awesome.

Trying to stay away from any JS framework or build system for my sanity.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#10

Post by CharlieDigital » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

wheelerwj wrote: post #4

CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

I'm a big fan of Firebase. The local emulators make working with it really productive since you can iterate locally against the full stack very quickly. SSO and auth are easy to use; way easier than Cognito. For most clients, it will be virtually free to operate until they reach significant traffic. For your static front-ends, Firebase hosting is fully integrated into Google Cloud CDN with no extra setup. You can ext…

I kind of just assumed people were still using wordpress… especially for projects that require SEO. Aren’t you having problems with clients wanting to update content on their own?

Projects that require SEO will benefit from static site generation (SSG).

My use cases have limited customer managed content, but it's not hard to connect SSG to headless CMS for authoring.

I don't recommend non-managed WP these days because of how much effort it takes to keep it from getting compromised.