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Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

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Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#21

Post by oyebenny »

mcat wrote: post #16
rwieruch wrote: post #13

If you want to outsource it, I can agree that the easiest way is to provide a simple interface for the other party. That's where a CMS like Wordpress would make sense. On the other hand, if you want to have more control in the long term, I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you…

We're built www.takeshape.io for this exact use case. Quick way to get your static site up and running with a CMS backend. If you're interested I can put you into the beta program.

May I be in the beta program please?

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#22

Post by surfin »

What are your requirements in terms of editing / updating (e.g. adding new blogs) content once your site is live? If you expect non-technical person being able to author the content, you may consider headless CMS like Kentico Cloud (https://kenticocloud.com/) or Contentful (https://www.contentful.com/) to store and manage your content and then pull it to your template via technology of your choice. Eventually, you could feed that content to static web page generators like Hugo and serve only generated pages.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#23

Post by alxwu »

I recommend using jekyll or hugo for your site using either netlify or forestry.io for the CMS and hosting. This is the future, and it can be hard to convince the non tech savvy, but I think you know the benefits. I'm willing to help if you run into any questions with setup. You can find me here: http://templatestud.io/.

P.S. This is from working with Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress sites in the past. Static sites are the way to go.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#24

Post by flaviocopes »

I would leverage your existing knowledge but avoid WordPress, and instead use Grav (https://getgrav.org). It's open source and much more flexible than WordPress, plus it does not require a database (it's a flat-file CMS) and it's very easy to build a site with it.

You don't have to have WordPress as the go-to resource for everything, but also you don't really have to roll your own CMS every time you build up a site, which is quite a time consuming task.

Grav offers a light experience to a CMS, and you can decide if you want to just work with markdown files, or rely on the Admin panel for easier editing.

(Disclosure: I'm a dev team member).

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#25

Post by aussieguy1234 »

Use WordPress for your website with a custom theme. There's really not that much to it and your going to get tons of features basically for free.

However use other things for your SaaS platform, WordPress is too slow for that kind of thing. Instead go with something lightweight like Slim Framework.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#26

Post by javipas »

I'm surprised to see so much answers leading to use a Static Website Generator. WordPress certainly can be problematic, but I think that there are clear advantages in both cases. You've got to make tradeoffs in both too.

I've been hearing a lot about Hugo lately, but my main concern as a blog editor with static website generators is the fact that they are great for, well, static content. If you want to update your site with new content and features (posts, pages, sections, widgets, comments, web statistics) WordPress make that easier.

On static websites generators —at least the ones I tried a couple of years ago, octopress/pelican/jekyll— these systems are great if you want to just have a good/superfast landing page and a few other pages laying around. Once you want to add new pages and posts you had to recompile everything again, something that wasn't a good idea with sites that grow dinamically through time with hundreds or thousands of posts (like my blog, for example).

Please let me know if Hugo (and others) solves the "recompilation" issue to rebuild the site each time, I'm probably wrong or not updated here. In your case it seems that static website generator could be a good fit though.

Squarespace is really nice too, btw. Good attention to design and detail, not so versatile as WordPress.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#27

Post by ohashi »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #25

Use WordPress for your website with a custom theme. There's really not that much to it and your going to get tons of features basically for free. However use other things for your SaaS platform, WordPress is too slow for that kind of thing. Instead go with something lightweight like Slim Framework.

There's also the maintenance aspect of it all. Who is going to update it? A lot of people have experience working with WordPress - creating new content, the process, etc. There's a ton of documentation for basically everything. I know a ton of non-technical people who can do a decent amount with WordPress because of all that.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#28

Post by shakna »

javipas wrote: post #26

I'm surprised to see so much answers leading to use a Static Website Generator. WordPress certainly can be problematic, but I think that there are clear advantages in both cases. You've got to make tradeoffs in both too. I've been hearing a lot about Hugo lately, but my main concern as a blog editor with static website generators is the fact that they are great for, well, static content. If you want to update your si…

> Please let me know if Hugo (and others) solves the "recompilation" issue to rebuild the site each time,

Is that really a big problem?

All my static sites get built by CI, not locally.

Push a change via git, system takes care of the rest.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#29

Post by thenomad »

javipas wrote: post #26

I'm surprised to see so much answers leading to use a Static Website Generator. WordPress certainly can be problematic, but I think that there are clear advantages in both cases. You've got to make tradeoffs in both too. I've been hearing a lot about Hugo lately, but my main concern as a blog editor with static website generators is the fact that they are great for, well, static content. If you want to update your si…

I'm using Hugo currently on a site with tens of thousands of pages - it was converted from a Wordpress site which was updated multiple times a day for about 4 years.

Compilation time is around a minute. It's really not a big deal.

Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

#30

Post by ingmarheinrich »

mcat wrote: post #16
rwieruch wrote: post #13

If you want to outsource it, I can agree that the easiest way is to provide a simple interface for the other party. That's where a CMS like Wordpress would make sense. On the other hand, if you want to have more control in the long term, I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you…

We're built www.takeshape.io for this exact use case. Quick way to get your static site up and running with a CMS backend. If you're interested I can put you into the beta program.

Me too beta, pretty please!
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