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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#311

Post by Nemi »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #250
motoxpro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.

my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.

Because part of their job, if they are good at it, is to present some data, measure how customers are responding to it, and then tweaking said data to get a better response. If you make it too hard for them to “tweak” it, then they will be more reluctant to tweak it. Thereby doing a poorer job.

Them being able to easily change the website is critical for them to be able to do their job. As in most things in life, it is a balance that needs to be achieved and not one thing that trumps everything else.

As others have said, WP gives them a way to easily change the data that they are responsible for. It should be the devs/systems engineers responsibility to make that data present as a static web page using plugins or caching layers and that should be transparent to the marketers.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#312

Post by apitman »

JellyBeanThief wrote: post #79
graypegg wrote: post #68

In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web hosting provider. It worked great for them.…

I mean, isn't the whole idea of a web browser kind of contrary to the ideals of the web? It implicitly divides people into speakers and listeners. In a parallel universe, web browsers are called webitors, and they can edit websites as well as view them. People can suggest changes. People can publish annotations. Web hosting is like email--pick (or build) any service you like and pick (or build) any client you like. T…

I recommend reading the short book Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#313

Post by apitman »

wruza wrote: post #186
neilv wrote: post #161

There is a complicating factor for a Web developer's personal Web site: resumé-driven-development (RDD). For those professionals who try to use personal side projects for RDD, so that they don't have to sabotage as many employers' projects as they would otherwise. Which leads me to this morning, for example... For an indie Web site I'm about to launch -- and for which I'm using a popular modern Web framework, mainly…

The site could be 5 simple handwritten HTML files, one with a sprinkling of JS inline in it, plus 2 small Perl CGI scripts. And it would work perfectly for 25 years and counting. Or it could be something in between, because it’s convenient to do so. In my case, I couldn’t care less of resumes and offers, but still I want something more ergonomic than spitting out htmls from templates in js/python. So my sites are a m…

Nice stack, but are you really using it to make complicated enough sites that TypeScript is much benefit? Drop that build step baby.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#314

Post by deanishe »

hoseja wrote: post #234
andrepd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if we all have supercomputers in our pockets which could easily handle text and images of only web devs didn't shove 10MB of code in an interpreted language every time time we open a page!

Half of the people on this site are those very same webdevs.

What's up with that?

Why would you rather build SUVs for soccer moms than race cars?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#315

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #150
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say all of the advantages go away, but I read, “if you put in extra work you can achieve some of what static sites get for free”. Which is kind of funny as the main advantage of static sites is fewer things to worry about.

The article is about how static sites are too complicated for normal people to set up, so people aren't getting those benefits for free because it's too hard for them to do. Edit: The other thing is that non-technical users want a WYSIWYG editor. They don't want to edit markdown or html text files. So once you have all the infrastructure in place to support that it's not really any more complicated to make your custo…

You and I seem to have interpreted the article differently.

I read it as static sites are simpler, but paradoxically less popular because the additional parts of hosting a website are hard (getting a domain, hosting, deploying).

> So once you have all the infrastructure in place to support that it's not really any more complicated to make your customers' webpages dynamic as well.

To me, this is the exact problem the article is pointing out, lol.

99% of website could be a simple static page, but instead waste resources with complex CMS, database, caching, heavy front end layer, etc.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#316

Post by carlosjobim »

bergie wrote: post #240
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…

Back in 2011 I built a JS-based thing for making essentially any website editable: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_us... This required you to add a bit of RDFa markup to identify the editable parts (including collections, so you could add a news item or whatever), and then had a Backbone.js plugin setup for implementing saving to your chosen CMS. This all could likely be done easier today. B…

There is a similar solution in SurrealCMS[1], where the user will edit their website pages in complete WYSIWYG. It works perfectly for clients who are not programmers, and should replace WordPress for about 99% of websites (except for blogs of course).

There is no reason at all for WordPress, it just became popular because people online were recommending it to each other without a thought as to why. I myself was one of these small time web devs, thinking that user editable pages would require such complicated NASA back-ends that WordPress was the only solution. In the end WordPress has been a huge net-negative on the economy as a whole, for all time wasted.

>This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git.

SurrealCMS connects by FTP instead to solve this.

[1] https://www.surrealcms.com

* "What you see is what you get"

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#317

Post by FalconSensei »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #250
motoxpro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.

my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.

The mass of readers don't have the same requirements as HackerNews commenters. Proof is that content on wordpress still gets viewed and apparently, leads to sales.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#318

Post by comte7092 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #250
motoxpro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.

my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.

Imagine if you were told that you had to do all of your software development work in notepad, because for whatever reason that lead to better optimized code… would you be ok with that?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#319

Post by FalconSensei »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #298
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…

My experience as well ! And even when we do give WP-like ease of editing with background static generation, editors still want WP, because this or that plugin.

> editors still want WP, because this or that plugin

So you are saying that you are still missing functionality

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#320

Post by Karrot_Kream »

wruza wrote: post #244
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but that's okay at a smaller scale where all the users are more aligned and there's less karma to get. HN now is big enough that gaming the karma system by commenting quickly with rage or nostalgia bait is a winning strategy and for most general appeal topics on the site these days that's exactly what happens.

Part of that may be you learned to detect these behaviors and not always correctly. Another part may be old commenters getting nostalgic and/or angry (a thing in life). Did my homework though and checked top ten threads and their first comments where all these karma people should be. All top comments are pretty HN spirited. One of these may be called nostalgic but has a specific request in it and doesn’t look like a…

Yeah these things are all pretty relative of the reader's perspective. FWIW I mean this specifically for the less technical threads. Technical threads still seem to rank contributions appropriately. But the moment you touch on something more cultural, like the long term computer thread, or the Mr Beast thread from the other day, you get a lot of pretty low signal comments that get a lot of karma. I do find that the very top of the comments page stays okay but the moment you get past the very top you get lots of low effort comments.
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