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

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

#21

Post by dmje »

michelb wrote: post #9

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.

Have a +1, I’m with you all the way. Of course, brace yourself for downvotes: this is HN, so by default WordPress will get voted down and so will anyone who says not to use JS as a front end :-)

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

#22

Post by KronisLV »

thih9 wrote: post #16
pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…

> Do not build stuff based on a web browser just so you can call it multi-platform, you will end up shipping a crappy abstraction with a poor UI and even worse performance (...) In many cases this sounds better than shipping for only one platform - or not shipping at all.

Plus, if your app idea is basically served by the features that a web app or a PWA offers, then you can write it more or less once (might need a few standalone browser checks in specific places) and deploy on multiple devices, for example, with https://www.pwabuilder.com/

I'm doing that right now. I'm having enough troubles with payment integration and proper auth and back end stuff, there's no way I could ship for web and two different mobile platforms at all without cutting too many corners.

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

#23

Post by fourside »

thih9 wrote: post #16
pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…

> Do not build stuff based on a web browser just so you can call it multi-platform, you will end up shipping a crappy abstraction with a poor UI and even worse performance (...) In many cases this sounds better than shipping for only one platform - or not shipping at all.

[dead]

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

#24

Post by whalesalad »

osler wrote: post #12

How come I don't see anyone recommending ruby and ruby on rails? I am curious as I am going this route.

rails is not a bad choice. you might outgrow it, but once you hit that threshold your scale will be quite substantial and the correct/next path forward will become clear.

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

#25

Post by rambambram »

I work daily on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB. I run Raspberry OS with a local Apache2 server. I use gedit (Gnome text editor, only syntax highlighting, line numbers and a little file browser) to program PHP, MySQL and a little Javascript. GIMP I use for editing photos and creating images (also for print). Kdenlive works for editing small to medium size videos. Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Rhythmbox and SuperTuxKart are also necessary for my workday.

I cannot think of a simpler setup. I'm not even a minimalist, I just can't stand Windows and Apple. Annoying software, blegh. Or paying thousands of bucks for a more powerful computer that I don't need. The RPi4 just works. Quick enough. And then it gets out of the way.

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

#26

Post by ksimon »

Hi Pete,

For those of your clients who requested website overhauls, they'll probably prefer to keep their new websites on the same location, as their own hosting, usually it's a cPanel hosting account, like HostGator or GoDaddy, so WordPress is a first choice, if you (and they?) enjoy using it.

But as you mentioned they're local businesses, with limited budget and needs for basic web presence, they would probably love to manage their websites on their own and WordPress may look scary for most of the less technical users. You can try Kopage (https://kopage.com), similar to WordPress, it can be self-hosted, but it works in the cloud in the first place. And it's free.

A little disclaimer: Kopage is one of my projects, and this was the exact reason it was created in the first place, as a tool as user-friendly and intuitive as possible for our own clients, so they can manage their own websites and don't be afraid to break something.

There's a white-label plan if you'd like to offer it under your own brand.

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

#28

Post by bryanculver »

This will sound like cheating but I argue for the time it saves me, both in creation and on-going maintenance, and delivering a quality finished project: Squarespace.

The clients are happy, if they get to the point where they want to manage the content themselves, and for less than $300/yr they get hosting, access to a payment processor if they need it, and domain renewal. It's been a no-brainer.

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

#29

Post by nine_k »

rambambram wrote: post #25

I work daily on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB. I run Raspberry OS with a local Apache2 server. I use gedit (Gnome text editor, only syntax highlighting, line numbers and a little file browser) to program PHP, MySQL and a little Javascript. GIMP I use for editing photos and creating images (also for print). Kdenlive works for editing small to medium size videos. Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Rhythmbox and SuperTuxKart…

GEdit is nice as is, but there are language server plugins e.g. if you need better navigation.

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

#30

Post by robofanatic »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…

> remember Heroku f* everyone sideways

Can you elaborate please? I hosted an API on heroku recently. I have no problem so far. Should I be concerned?

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