
All I want to do is build a web site - krithix
http://about.grow.io/blog/all-i-want-to-do-is-build-a-web-site/
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GrinningFool
All I want to do is build a web site.

    
    
        apt-get install nginx
        vi /var/www/index.html
    

Poof.

I find the writeup similarly misleading.

"all I want to do is build a web site"...

"... hosted on google apps..".

... manage content

... collaborate among team members

... CMSy stuff.

So in other words, all you want to do is build a pipelined _product_. Which is
totally cool - but it's definitely not just building a web site.

~~~
grecy
I get your point, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter.

Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the
average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.

Almost daily I have friends/family come to me with a business idea that starts
off as "it will be easy.. just like <huge site> but with blah".

Non-tech people honestly think 'websites' are simple things, and we should be
able to knock-out a Facebook or Twitter clone in a few days.

~~~
marcosdumay
For some reason non-tech people think desktop applications are always hard to
create, and web sites are always simple.

~~~
rbritton
You can extend that to apps too. I can't count the number of items
friends/family have had "great" ideas for apps that we could split the profit
on.

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USNetizen
"These days, the person doing the development is often different from the
person doing the visual design, is different from the person structuring the
content, is different from the person actually writing the content, is
different from the person reviewing the launch, is different from the person
writing the check to pay for the whole thing"

...uhhh, not unless you work in a bloated enterprise shop. Most of the time,
it's a one to three person show and one person CAN do it all (albeit maybe not
everything equally perfect). I launch websites (whole platforms actually) -
from server to web services to content - all the time, every few days. It is
entirely possible and you get accustomed to it.

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Rodeoclash
Err, I'd say that it's getting easier then ever for one person to build a
website by themselves.

\- Rails/Angular go a long way to speeding up development due to the number of
3rd party libraries available for them. Need User logins? Devise. Need queue
processing? Sidekiq. AngularJS is going the same way as Rails for awesome 3rd
party libraries.

\- Bootstrap almost solves visual design for prototypes, and it's not hard to
start customising the templates or even buying a 3rd party one off the shelf.
It's not going to win any awards for graphic design but it's fine for 99% of
people that will be using your site.

Case in point, I built
[http://www.knowyourgenre.com](http://www.knowyourgenre.com), as site for
exploring music by genres, in around 3 months (with a lot of backtracking and
taking bits out that I didn't wind up using).

1 person, I did the front end, back end and graphic design for it.

Not to say that grow is a bad idea, but I don't agree with the argument that 1
person can't build a site anymore, in fact I think it's getting easier.

~~~
colbyh
Thanks for putting that into words more nicely than I would have been able to.
Grow looks interesting and I applaud them for the initiative, but it's hard to
agree with all that they are saying when their definition of a "web page" is
not at all congruent with my personal definition.

For anyone at Grow that is reading this - I think you might find more people
in agreement if you show them an apples to apples comparison. Show me all that
it would take to launch comparable apps on GAE vs. Grow and let that speak for
itself.

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ChuckMcM
Ok, stepping back and critiquing here, the call to action falls hard on the
fact that 'website' doesn't have a common enough definition.

It is in fact _trivial_ to build a web site, one person. My sister did it (not
technical) went to WPEngine.com got the basic package, went to name.com and
got a domain that wasn't taken yet, and added Google apps for the email
component. Boom, "web site" and she is very non-technical, but she does know
how to use a search engine.

Then there are the Geo/NeoCitites type things - also pretty trivial. And new
entrant Ghost, also easy to do for one person.

Then there are the Github Pages, Dropbox pages, and Google Drive pages (and
Google Sites for that matter, an unwanted love child with Jot).

If you are actually modestly technical then it gets even easier.

So that whole "its rocket science" meme doesn't really fly and that takes away
from the whole 'this is hard we're here to help' theme.

------
VeejayRampay
There are tons of website builders that allow you to create simple (to rather
complex) websites nowadays. Squarespace, Jimdo, Wix to name a few can be great
tools depending on your needs. No technical skills required, content creation
and publication tend to be pretty accessible and all the hosting and domain
name handling is usually fully taken care of.

I'm myself working for a French startup called Pikock[1] that is working hard
on the next iteration of its drag-and-drop website builder. We're trying to
make it as simple, efficient and streamlined as possible so that everyone gets
a shot beyond the tech-savvy. Our core vision is that everyone, no matter the
skill level is entitled to a presence online if they so choose.

Ultimately I want my 65-year old mom to be able to create content and share it
with the world, even though there might not be an audience for her collection
of hand-painted pebbles :)

[1] [http://www.pikock.com/en](http://www.pikock.com/en)

------
d0m
Yeah I'm always surprised about how hard it is to put a website online.

I think there's a market for a service helping a team getting started on the
right foot.

It could start with a popular stack of services and frameworks, let's say: \-
Github, Heroku, S3, node.js, angular, grunt, bower, yo, bootstrap, etc etc.

And just make it dead simple to have it configured and deployed.

Now, all these services are awesome by themselves, but they all require their
own quirks and quacks to work together which makes it a real pain to get
started.

------
badman_ting
All I want to do is build a website!

Oh, and it should have a nice menu system for doing things related to the site
when on a page.

Oh, and it should respond to the device and browser of the person using it,
with the layout and functionality adjusting accordingly.

Oh, and the images should be the appropriate size for that device, because we
don't want users on cellular networks to have to download large images.

Oh, and it should display for them in their preferred language. And without
having to choose the language from a menu. Don't tell me about this
internationali-whatsit and local-whoozits, I said _it should display in their
language_! (God, you developers are annoying.)

Oh, and it should mirror the smoothness of the native applications of the
user's device.

Oh, and it should be built on roughly the same technologies which websites
have been using for the last 15 years. And I don't want to hear about "HTML is
a system for describing documents, not applications" or "CSS is for styling
documents, it's not a layout engine".

Yeah, you know, jeez, why is this so hard????? Everyone is stupid and in my
way.

~~~
yeukhon
?? where is my queue, my asynchronous library, my database exception handler,
my security check, my cache database, my socket sub/pub.

OMG. HOW THE HELL DO I BUILD A WEBSITE?

Nightmare. Hence why I rather build tool that runs over command line than
building an actual website. It is damn hard.

~~~
EpicEng
I don't think I would call writing a bunch of glue code _hard_. Annoying and
time consuming perhaps, but "hard"? Nah, not often.

~~~
yeukhon
Coming up with an algorithm is not hard. It is just time consuming and
annoying because brute force is stupid to people. So, gluing code in some
brain dead fashion (wtf do I do here? Oh no better solution so I will patch
this patch that with stitches) is hard because it is like brutcing. There are
too many "libraries" and none can do everything easily. Complex system is the
end result. Then engineers spend most of their time reducing the complexity.
If there was a framework that could reduce in the first stage then it is
easier, not harder.

------
dwb
I thought this was going to be an argument for simplicity but then it started
talking about complex things. Git and SASS and Python and whatnot are great,
but if you _just_ want to build a website, like in the Good Old Days, surely
[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/) does the trick. Put HTML
files in your 10MB of space.

This sounds like a friendlier Heroku and may well turn out to be brilliant,
but it is still a lot more than just building a website.

------
mistercow
When I made our wedding website, I wrote a short python cgi script to push
markdown files through a parser and paste them into a template. Then I wrote a
CSS file to make it pretty, and popped that up with a static HTML home page on
NearlyFreeSpeech behind CloudFlare. We're talking about 27 lines of python, 62
lines of HTML, and 135 lines of CSS.

My point here isn't that people should do exactly what I did. Rather, my point
is that most of a web developer's job is finding the right components and then
writing a little bit of code to glue them together. Stop looking for some
special system that holds your hand like a toddler through every step of every
process, and just write some damned code to do the thing you need done.

I personally don't believe in learning and deploying an entire framework to
save less than 250 lines of code.

------
smoyer
This is precisely why web-hosting providers exist. You can find someone to
host most of the common CMSs, you can certainly find a company that will run a
web server on your behalf (so you can deploy a static site). If you really
want a tuned WordPress installation there's WPEngine.

If you don't want to deal with the installation and configuration of the
underlying software, don't lease a VPS or any other type of server ... lease a
"service".

EDIT: I completely forgot about sites like Weebly. You don't even have any
research to do with this type of solution as you just use what you're given.

------
TheMakeA
I'm working on something that's sort of the opposite called Strapper[1]. The
thing is, when I'm trying to launch a new product, I don't even want to build
a website. It's a huge distraction. And I don't want to build on a CMS like
Wordpress, because I'll just have to replace it with Rails when the project
scope grows.

Different strokes for different folks though. What someone needs to build a
blog or portfolio is going to be different from what you need to build a
startup.

[1] [http://www.strapper.io](http://www.strapper.io)

~~~
snowwrestler
> I don't want to build on a CMS like Wordpress, because I'll just have to
> replace it with Rails when the project grows.

Why? Rails is not any more scalable than Wordpress.

~~~
nbouscal
I think the parent meant growth in scope, not in scale.

------
wasd
I think your messaging could be a bit more clear. What you do is pretty
abstract. After reading the article and your landing page, I'm not actually
sure what your product does or why I would want it.

------
monokrome
If someone doesn't like the "modern" way of building websites, or thinks that
it requires so much more work than the old way - then I recommend they try the
old way.

The modern way is much more efficient.

------
buckbova
Blocked from my work. Bluecoat likes to categorize many of these .io domains
as "Suspicious". It's annoying.

~~~
Nzen
Announces a website launcher thing that deemphasizes configuration without
preference for dynamic/static or local/cloud. (Not sure how precise that is.
Says site will be file-based and has browser site editor.) Mentions capable
with AWS and Google cloud. Allows collaboration. Launch can be specified for a
certain date. User controls. And git is the vcs.

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1angryhacker
This is an advert. Don't make me read half of it to find out. Sick of these
posts!

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bicknergseng
So... a copy of Wordpress that runs on Google Cloud Platform?

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Angostura
All I want to do is build a Web site

www.weebly.com

------
oddshocks
Screenshots?

