I wish I had some brilliant non-WP insight to share with you but once you deal with WordPress' security issues (not minor but conquerable), its ubiquity and flexibility make it a great solution for most smaller-scale (content-wise) projects -- the fact that you can turn to anyone from the local college kid to a major agency and hand them your site and they're going to be able to execute, or you can take it back and do it yourself at a moment's notice, it's just hard to beat that.
Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#12For a SaaS company like yours, I would do a site that's static content served from a CDN (generated by something like jekyll and friends). Obviously a site deployed that way is largely fail-proof and fast, but there's another (and larger) benefit people don't often mention:
Having your site content live in the git repo instead of a database is amazing. In fact, this is the approach taken by most documentation sites these days. It makes it so much easier and faster to make changes, updates, and experiment. I use Netlify as a static host; they have features to make any commit, pull request, or branch into a hosted preview. It's an awesome way to work.
(For less technical editors, you can plug them into the process with something like NetlifyCMS, a clever open source project from the same folks that basically is a CMS interface running on git / github.)
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#13If 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 can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.
- [0] https://gohugo.io/
- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/
- [2] https://pages.github.com/
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#14If only you'll be editing the site, as a dev, I always like to roll my own. Simple HTML/JS/CSS.
Feel like I have more control, less learning and I enjoy it.
But that's the dev bias.
If you want other non technical people to edit or make changes, choose a CMS.
Your goal is to get your message out there asap so you can solve problems.
End of day, the customer doesn't care, only you do. You can always change it later.
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#15i've spent a CONSIDERABLE amount of time looking into this lately for a few projects. at this point, id definitely recommend wordpress + oneclick install on digital ocean for a company site. its so fast and easy, its really hassle free. which is the single most important thing when launching. time is already in short supply, so you want to (have to) invest it wisely. is a better "about us" page going to give you more return then product refinement or sales? absolutely not.
this is one of the few times that the right thing is also the easy thing.
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#16If 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.
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#17For a SaaS company like yours, I would do a site that's static content served from a CDN (generated by something like jekyll and friends). Obviously a site deployed that way is largely fail-proof and fast, but there's another (and larger) benefit people don't often mention: Having your site content live in the git repo instead of a database is amazing. In fact, this is the approach taken by most documentation sites t…
I support this very much. WP is quick to setup but becomes a huge pain in the a* very quickly. Everything needs a plugin. Caching, backups, multilanguage support - these were the big ones for us. It becomes very fragile and hard to update, at some point you start spending a lot of time maintaining everything.
At the end I just sat down for an afternoon and wrote 500 lines of reusable python/flask that did exactly what we needed [1]. Even though it's my code this is actually much less work to maintain compared to some MySQL-PHP-WP-10Plugins-JS-Nginx-Kraken monster.
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#18If you are fine with PHP there is also the option of OctoberCMS built on top of the Laravel framework, have to say I really enjoy it so far.
https://www.atlantic.net/blog/october-cms/
http://www.archybold.com/blog/post/laravel-vs-october-cms-di...
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#19If you are fine with PHP there is also the option of OctoberCMS built on top of the Laravel framework, have to say I really enjoy it so far.
http://octobercms.com/ https://www.atlantic.net/blog/october-cms/ http://www.archybold.com/blog/post/laravel-vs-october-cms-di...
Re: Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?
#20A host who specializes in Wordpress can take a lot of the sting out managing it (patching, caching, security, etc). I'm in the process of moving a bunch of WP sites off of dedicated hosting for this exact reason.
So far the best options look like WPEngine, Wordpress.com, or Pantheon.
I've also worked with Squarespace and would caution that developers can find it to be frustrating--requires a lot of hovering and clicking to configure pages and post content. Not really a fan now--too much of a pain.