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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#271

Post by Aeolun »

zild3d wrote: post #237
marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text edito…

> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience

That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves.

You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is that many do not care about what their job is (just like many recent engineers), they just care that it’s easy to do and they don’t get fired. So… Wordpress.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#272

Post by macspoofing »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

>I'm always confused as to why these particular people get to be the ones who make the choice.

Is it really confusing?

They are the ones that are supposed to maintain it (from a content perspective) ... unless you want to be called every time they want to fix a spelling mistake, write a blog post, add a section, adjust the color scheme, add/remove a section - because that's what would happen if force them to use git and raw css/html.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#273

Post by jglmn90 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

Just use a polished CMS like Sanity and get the best of both worlds

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#274

Post by account42 »

kristoff_it wrote: post #239
codazoda wrote: post #167

I tried the SuperHTML on a hand-coded site of mine and it reported only one problem and that problem is incorrect as far as I can tell. It tells me that the ` ` tag is never opened on an HTML 5 doc with a ` ` opening tag. The author does say it's not perfect and I probably need to double-check my understanding just to be sure. In any case, it seems like a useful thing and I am also surprised I never thought it was mi…

` ` is not paired with ` `. This is what the basic HTML5 boilerplate looks like:

If it complains about an unmatched , that's fine. But you can omit as it is an implied tag: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-ht...

> An html element's start tag can be omitted if the first thing inside the html element is not a comment.

> An html element's end tag can be omitted if the html element is not immediately followed by a comment.

The only explicit tag that is required for every HTML document is , which you supposed boilerplate misses.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#275

Post by immibis »

Aeolun wrote: post #271
zild3d wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text edito…

> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is…

We are suffering from some kind of crisis of measurable competency across the board. The appearance of contributing to achieving something is more important than actually achieving it. It may be related to the preceding extremely long ZIRP period.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#276

Post by macspoofing »

Aeolun wrote: post #271
zild3d wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text edito…

> You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is…

>That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway).

Huh? What are you talking about? Marketing is the job of Marketers, which in most companies (certainly small to mid companies) includes the content on the marketing web-page.

>You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them

The technical aspect of how a web-site works, or how it is deployed or how quickly it is rendered, is NOT their job. Optimizing render speed of a given web-page is not part of their skillset - nor should it be. There are folks who specialize in that, typically software engineers. It is also not reasonable to expect marketing folks to create html/css/javascript and deploy via git. You really do want those folks to be independent and create the necessary content without needing an engineer anytime they want to add a new sub-section or fix a spelling mistake.

One "problem" is that most small/mid size businesses are not willing to hire technical folks or use engineering resources to do the technical part of this work. Another problem is that there should not be a tension between ease-of-use by editor and page rendering speed. Maybe WP is a bad product, and if so, what is the alternative that covers both use cases?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#277

Post by immibis »

foresto wrote: post #192
makeitdouble wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another "interactive" part: contact forms. Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an alternative, but handling the input pipeline is better. On a static site that requires finding a service they trust to handle the submission and correctly plug it in their site. It becomes another moving part, potentially another bill that needs to be paid sep…

More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor: Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields an…

These hurdles only exist for the 0.0001% of people who deliberately hampered their own web experience in an attempt to reduce ads or tracking.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#278

Post by closewith »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #257
figassis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the issue. I'm an engineer, and I moved away from WP years ago, now I use ghost. But wordpress gives you that feeling of control, that you just need to search for "online store", and you get 100 plugins, including woocommerce, that are full blown ecommerce platforms. It's less the blogging, and more the customizable application that laymen can hammer into their desired function by clicking and dragging, no co…

Trying to explain to someone how static sites work vs how WP works, and that the server has to literally recreate the entire page from a bunch of database entries (having first compiled all the PHP files into something the server understands) for every single page request . It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web.

> It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web.

What's crazy is your wilful ignorance of _why_ WP is so popular. One important reason is that it allows writers to avoid people like you, who hold them in disdain without even the slightest attempt to understand their needs.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#279

Post by shaicoleman »

dimal wrote: post #147

We’re dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G, and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k o…

As a workaround, you can try using Opera Mini and configure the Data Savings option.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#280

Post by petra »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

Elementor bought strattic, which offered static wordpress hosting. I believe they use this technology in their hosting offering.
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