

Ask HN: When your friends ask "can you build me a website?" - dazbradbury

Hey HN,<p>It always happens, someone has an idea, and they want to create a website quickly and cheaply. So they turn to their techy friends, and ask you to do it!<p>Now, the majority of such sites are just a logo and some content, which they will produce themselves. Hence, my question is, rather than building and hosting a static site for them, where do you send them so they can do it themselves? Obviously there a huge number of options out there, but the ones I've come across all seem very crude.<p>I'm imagining something like Tumblr in terms of ease of use and customisable design, but without the blogging focus.<p>Would love to know!
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alphast0rm
I'm surprised no one has mentioned YC-backed Weebly, which solves this exact
problem:

<http://www.weebly.com/>

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mnicole
<http://www.squarespace.com/> and <http://www.virb.com/> are going to have the
best looking pre-defined templates. If this person is wanting something for a
portfolio, <http://www.cargocollective.com/> has some good stuff.

<http://salon.io/> from a ShowHN yesterday is also in this realm. The landing
page says it's for images/portfolios but their inline editor lets you do
pretty much whatever.

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dylanhassinger
The competition is fierce, check out Smore.com and Onepagerapp.com. Also
WordPress.com can be used for more specialized sites now, see
WordPress.com/restaurants for example.

But if you can do better than that (or find a niche that is not being served),
go for it!

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plebu
My startup, Plebu.com, is a website builder with less features. You can
customize the design, add text pages, galleries, and a contact page. That's
it. The sites you build are mobile friendly. Please let me know what you
think.

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joonix
If they're looking for a more content heavy site rather than just a "face" for
their B&M business, I'd point them to Wordpress, ideally hosting their own,
but Wordpress.com offers hosted sites. The interface is easy to figure out and
there's a ton of themes and plugins out there, as well as tutorials.

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xauronx
But good luck getting them out of there if they ever need it. It's such a
bitch (just finished moving my friends cooking blog off there to a dedicated
host). Also, even if you pay for their best plans they don't allow you to put
ads on your site or install your own plugins. It's kind of a mess.

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jamesjguthrie
Agree with the others that this could be a great idea for a startup!

At the moment I just recommend setting up a WordPress site, it's pretty
straight forward and can look good if themed properly etc.

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tzaman
There you have it, an excellent idea for a startup! Nothing drastically
"disruptive" but a viable business nonetheless :)

Regarding the service, I have yet to find one like this myself.

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evv
Check out squarespace, they probably fit the bill.

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creativeone
Unbounce.com

