cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12989654
I'm a novice so I chose the most novice-friendly option I could find - Squarespace. But I've had lots of problems with them, and they keep raising their prices, and they hide features like javascript code behind even higher prices.
I learned about SSGs https://jamstack.org/generators, which create fast and secure sites that can be hosted for free on Netlify and other similar sites. The downside is they're limited to static content -- IE: you can't have a contact form without paying a 3rd party.
I found a novice-friendly SSG theme for wikis/documentation -- MKDocs Material -- but I haven't been able to find anything for a regular business site.
This seems to be one of the most popular Jekyll themes https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/about/ but it seems to be mainly for blogs and documentation, and doesn't seem to have all the design options that Squarespace does.
I read that healthcare.gov used Jekyll https://medium.com/devseed/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-cms-free-41c25249cf38 in conjunction with https://prose.io. So I looked it up and found this https://github.com/CMSgov/HealthCare.gov-Styleguide which actually seems pretty decent; but also not complete enough. Their newer version https://github.com/CMSgov/design-system seems more complete/extensive, but also quite technical. It looks like it requires too much coding for me.
Weebly seems to be a slightly cheaper alternative to Squarespace but it's missing some features and Square might end it in a few years.
I've never used Wordpress but now that I've hosted a few websites I'm thinking about purchasing Oxygen https://oxygenbuilder.com/ and hosting a Wordpress site myself. Oxygen is like a more advanced version of Squarespace with a 1-time payment equal to 1 year of Squarespace. Then you just have the monthly costs of hosting the server, which should be $5-10 (no idea how this scales with amount of traffic, do you?). There is a plugin/addon to export a static site, but it might not be worth the trouble.
According to https://servebolt.com/articles/calculate-how-many-simultaneous-website-visitors/ a 2-core server ($5) with a webpage that takes 300ms to load can serve:
- 400/minute
- 24,000/hr
- 288,000/12 hrs
A lot of people use Wordpress, but also seem unsatisfied with it https://jamstack.org/survey/2022/#content-management-systems.
The Gutenberg editor may be new since the last time I tried Wordpress https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/gutenberg-wordpress, and it looks pretty similar to Squarespace. So maybe I don't even need Oxygen. I looked up "Gutenberg vs Oxygen" and people were saying to go with Gutenberg.
I've been considering Grav https://getgrav.org/ too, but similar to the SSGs, it doesn't seem to have all the design capabilities without coding them yourself.
I've seen people say you can get chat GPT to write HTML code for you but I've never used it and it seems like it would be difficult to design a website that way. I looked for a video but only found one covering writing content, not code.
I found out about Hostinger Website Builder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUjjGIfjh-4 which uses AI and looks very similar to Squarespace's builder. But there's no demo so I can't see exactly what it can do. But Hostinger is much cheaper than Squarespace, and you can choose to use Wordpress with it instead of the Hostinger builder.
I checked GreenGeeks and they say "We offer drag and drop website builders like Weebly and SitePad". Sitepad is $12/yr and makes static sites, but it looks like you need one of the popular GUI web panels to use it https://sitepad.com/docs/admin/supported-control-panels/. Similar to Weebly, it's also a bit more limited -- IE: you can't open a contact form in a lightbox from a button https://sitepad.com/docs/enduser/contact-form.
A benefit of using Hostinger or GreenGeeks is probably that I don't have to worry about a surge in traffic causing my site to go down. That's why I'm thinking they're a better option vs self-hosting on a VPS.
I found this video that seems quite good and covers more options I didn't know about: Ultimate Website Builder Comparison 2024 | Find the BEST One for You + Why I Hated Squarespace
Anyone know of better places/forums to discuss this type of thing? There seems to be hundreds of thousands of people using the jamstack SSGs but I haven't found a place where people discuss them. I've tried:
If you want a 100% uptime website that can handle surge traffic but also costs basically nothing when it's not being used, you're going to want to avoid traditional CMSs like Wordpress and learn to code. Deploy 11ty to Netlify with the understanding that if you're irresponsible with forms or suddenly blow through your bandwidth you're going to pay for the service to scale to meet demand.
If you absolutely must have a CMS, I'd recommend Statamic because it can act as an SSG and deploy to Netlify (which means you use the CMS as a local devtool only - no logging in over the internet). It's another one of those "bring your own front end" CMSs, but their Antlers templating language is completely fine.
FWIW Statamic (like many sites) fails my basic "is everything on the main site legible for dark-mode preferring users?" test:
Marketing site's gonna marketing site. The actual documentation has dark mode.
The main site isn't made with Statamic?
Anyway the docs pages fail in certain parts, too, anyway:
Are you injecting a dark mode?
No. In addition to browsers' prefers-dark-mode setting, there is also the fallback foreground and background color choice, used whenever a website does not specify a foreground or background color. One common case is when viewing a plain unstyled site or txt file.
A dark-mode preferring user might choose for these fallbacks a light foreground and dark background. The problem is then that some designers will carelessly specify either the foreground or background color (and not both), assuming that their choice will happen to have good contrast with every user's browser preferences.
More low contrast examples from the Statamic docs:
In Firefox's preferences page those settings are accessed with the "Manage Colors" button just below dark-mode selection, and look like this:
Notice that I am not overriding any colors specified by the page.
This is solved by slapping your design's color scheme on the
<body>, correct?Also:
I've never had a Statamic site myself, didn't know about it till this thread. I like site generators but don't want to invest energy in ones that don't handle colors very well. I don't want to have to override colors, either as a user or developer, though I often do. For a an SSG anyway I want to be able to trust the tool to handle legibility.
I'm also terrible with HTML and CSS.
Oh, Statamic is a BYOFE (Bring Your Own Front End). Out of the box, it gives you a templating language that you can take or leave. You are 100% responsible for all HTML, CSS, and whatever JS you feel like bringing to the table. There's no handling of colors or anything to override, because that's all on you. SSG is a mode it has, it's not the default.
It's pretty close to being a flat-file ExpressionEngine, if that helps.
I looked at the demo and it looks like a very simple text editor to make blogs.
It is extremely more than that.