
Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own? - leonroy
I&#x27;m building a SaaS product targeting the telephony sector. Finished my prototype (Spring Boot backend, basic jQuery&#x2F;Bootstrap front end) and raised a little scratch so I&#x27;m planning on building a company website, careers page, etc. before I start hiring.<p>Whilst I know PHP well enough (to really dislike it) temptation is to avoid Wordpress for the company site and go for something else (Jekyll, Ghost etc). Problem is a lot of the company web pages being churned out by design studios are Wordpress and I want to outsource at least the company web pages.<p>Has anyone here tried eschewing the typical Wordpress company website and rolled their own or alternatively gone for a completely different CMS?<p>Any pros or cons you&#x27;ve encountered?<p>To keep things simple I&#x27;m trying to limit my language focus to just Java8&#x2F;ECMAScript for now so keen to avoid throwing Ruby or Python based stacks into the mix.
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rwieruch
If you want to outsource it, I can agree that the easiest way is to provide a
simple interface for the other party. That's where a CMS like Wordpress would
make sense.

On the other hand, if you want to have more control in the long term, I can
recommend to use Hugo [0] as a static website generator.

They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with
basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You
can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3].
I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these
ingredients.

\- [0] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

\- [1] [http://themes.gohugo.io/](http://themes.gohugo.io/)

\- [2] [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

\- [3] [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

\- [4] [http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-
days/](http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/)

~~~
mcat
We're built www.takeshape.io for this exact use case. Quick way to get your
static site up and running with a CMS backend. If you're interested I can put
you into the beta program.

~~~
oyebenny
May I be in the beta program please?

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toddmorey
For a SaaS company like yours, I would do a site that's static content served
from a CDN (generated by something like jekyll and friends). Obviously a site
deployed that way is largely fail-proof and fast, but there's another (and
larger) benefit people don't often mention:

Having your site content live in the git repo instead of a database is
amazing. In fact, this is the approach taken by most documentation sites these
days. It makes it so much easier and faster to make changes, updates, and
experiment. I use Netlify as a static host; they have features to make any
commit, pull request, or branch into a hosted preview. It's an awesome way to
work.

(For less technical editors, you can plug them into the process with something
like NetlifyCMS, a clever open source project from the same folks that
basically is a CMS interface running on git / github.)

~~~
m_mueller
I support this very much. WP is quick to setup but becomes a huge pain in the
a* very quickly. _Everything_ needs a plugin. Caching, backups, multilanguage
support - these were the big ones for us. It becomes very fragile and hard to
update, at some point you start spending a lot of time maintaining everything.

At the end I just sat down for an afternoon and wrote 500 lines of reusable
python/flask that did exactly what we needed [1]. Even though it's my code
this is actually much _less_ work to maintain compared to some MySQL-PHP-
WP-10Plugins-JS-Nginx-Kraken monster.

[1]
[https://github.com/muellermichel/guetzli](https://github.com/muellermichel/guetzli)

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alxwu
I recommend using jekyll or hugo for your site using either netlify or
forestry.io for the CMS and hosting. This is the future, and it can be hard to
convince the non tech savvy, but I think you know the benefits. I'm willing to
help if you run into any questions with setup. You can find me here:
[http://templatestud.io/](http://templatestud.io/).

P.S. This is from working with Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress sites in the
past. Static sites are the way to go.

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javipas
I'm surprised to see so much answers leading to use a Static Website
Generator. WordPress certainly can be problematic, but I think that there are
clear advantages in both cases. You've got to make tradeoffs in both too.

I've been hearing a lot about Hugo lately, but my main concern as a blog
editor with static website generators is the fact that they are great for,
well, static content. If you want to update your site with new content and
features (posts, pages, sections, widgets, comments, web statistics) WordPress
make that easier.

On static websites generators —at least the ones I tried a couple of years
ago, octopress/pelican/jekyll— these systems are great if you want to just
have a good/superfast landing page and a few other pages laying around. Once
you want to add new pages and posts you had to recompile everything again,
something that wasn't a good idea with sites that grow dinamically through
time with hundreds or thousands of posts (like my blog, for example).

Please let me know if Hugo (and others) solves the "recompilation" issue to
rebuild the site each time, I'm probably wrong or not updated here. In your
case it seems that static website generator could be a good fit though.

Squarespace is really nice too, btw. Good attention to design and detail, not
so versatile as WordPress.

~~~
thenomad
I'm using Hugo currently on a site with tens of thousands of pages - it was
converted from a Wordpress site which was updated multiple times a day for
about 4 years.

Compilation time is around a minute. It's really not a big deal.

~~~
javipas
That's great. Time to test Hugo, it seems. Thanks ;)

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codegeek
From a purely technical perspective, WordPress is so meh. But from a business
and "time to market" perspective, it is not a bad choice. You can quickly put
up a landing page, career page etc on a decent VPS and get going. WordPress
also will give you tons of SEO and content marketing options out of the box.

One example. ConvertKit is killing it these days, right ? See their marketing
website. It is WordPress.

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wheelerwj
i've spent a CONSIDERABLE amount of time looking into this lately for a few
projects. at this point, id definitely recommend wordpress + oneclick install
on digital ocean for a company site. its so fast and easy, its really hassle
free. which is the single most important thing when launching. time is already
in short supply, so you want to (have to) invest it wisely. is a better "about
us" page going to give you more return then product refinement or sales?
absolutely not.

this is one of the few times that the right thing is also the easy thing.

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timdorr
What segment of the telephony market are you targeting? Are you going after a
smaller number of large companies, or as many small deals as you can get?

Basically, how important is human involvement in your sales process?

If it's really important, focusing on your website at all is probably a waste
of your time. Just choose whatever involves the least amount of work (probably
SquareSpace or Launchrock) and crank something out quick.

Revisit it later when the website is actually interfering with your sales.

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mabynogy
Static and markdown is the simplest I know.

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kaushalmodi
A really good static site generator: [Hugo](gohugo.io).

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uniacid
If you are fine with PHP there is also the option of OctoberCMS built on top
of the Laravel framework, have to say I really enjoy it so far.

[http://octobercms.com/](http://octobercms.com/)

[https://www.atlantic.net/blog/october-
cms/](https://www.atlantic.net/blog/october-cms/)

[http://www.archybold.com/blog/post/laravel-vs-october-cms-
di...](http://www.archybold.com/blog/post/laravel-vs-october-cms-differences-
part-1)

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rewrew
I wish I had some brilliant non-WP insight to share with you but once you deal
with WordPress' security issues (not minor but conquerable), its ubiquity and
flexibility make it a great solution for most smaller-scale (content-wise)
projects -- the fact that you can turn to anyone from the local college kid to
a major agency and hand them your site and they're going to be able to
execute, or you can take it back and do it yourself at a moment's notice, it's
just hard to beat that.

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snowwrestler
A host who specializes in Wordpress can take a lot of the sting out managing
it (patching, caching, security, etc). I'm in the process of moving a bunch of
WP sites off of dedicated hosting for this exact reason.

So far the best options look like WPEngine, Wordpress.com, or Pantheon.

I've also worked with Squarespace and would caution that developers can find
it to be frustrating--requires a lot of hovering and clicking to configure
pages and post content. Not really a fan now--too much of a pain.

~~~
ccajas
SquareSpace can feel nice for people setting up a brand new site. Problem I
found is that I had to migrate a site away from their old host into something
more user-friendly, but most of the SquareSpace templates looked nothing like
the corporate site and at the same time too similar to each other.

The company wanted no changed to be done to the design, so it did take time
eventually, but just wrestling a lot with its grid layout and CSS hacks to get
it looking just right with no visual bugs.

If I could do it again, I'd use Wordpress.org with BeaverBuilder. BB takes a
lot of the drag-and-drop functionality of SquareSpace and puts it into your
Wordpress site.

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kayman
If only you'll be editing the site, as a dev, I always like to roll my own.
Simple HTML/JS/CSS. Feel like I have more control, less learning and I enjoy
it. But that's the dev bias.

If you want other non technical people to edit or make changes, choose a CMS.

Your goal is to get your message out there asap so you can solve problems.

End of day, the customer doesn't care, only you do. You can always change it
later.

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aussieguy1234
Use WordPress for your website with a custom theme. There's really not that
much to it and your going to get tons of features basically for free.

However use other things for your SaaS platform, WordPress is too slow for
that kind of thing. Instead go with something lightweight like Slim Framework.

~~~
ohashi
There's also the maintenance aspect of it all. Who is going to update it? A
lot of people have experience working with WordPress - creating new content,
the process, etc. There's a ton of documentation for basically everything. I
know a ton of non-technical people who can do a decent amount with WordPress
because of all that.

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jusob
if you want to outsource, WordPress is the best choice. Make sure you use
different domains for WordPress and your app. Sucuri (recently bought)
provided a good managed WAF & security monitor for WordPress.

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flaviocopes
I would leverage your existing knowledge but avoid WordPress, and instead use
Grav ([https://getgrav.org](https://getgrav.org)). It's open source and much
more flexible than WordPress, plus it does not require a database (it's a
flat-file CMS) and it's very easy to build a site with it.

You don't have to have WordPress as the go-to resource for everything, but
also you don't really have to roll your own CMS every time you build up a
site, which is quite a time consuming task.

Grav offers a light experience to a CMS, and you can decide if you want to
just work with markdown files, or rely on the Admin panel for easier editing.

(Disclosure: I'm a dev team member).

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dbancajas
github pages. redirect your domain name. easy.

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lucasmullens
I would be surprised if you could only find companies that can design
Wordpress pages and not Ghost/Jekyll pages.

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chrisgoman
If you are just throwing something together, static S3 pages with Cloudflare
in front?

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surfin
What are your requirements in terms of editing / updating (e.g. adding new
blogs) content once your site is live? If you expect non-technical person
being able to author the content, you may consider headless CMS like Kentico
Cloud ([https://kenticocloud.com/](https://kenticocloud.com/)) or Contentful
([https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/)) to store and
manage your content and then pull it to your template via technology of your
choice. Eventually, you could feed that content to static web page generators
like Hugo and serve only generated pages.

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douche
We use a lot of Handelbars-based static html/js sites with no backend hosted
on Azure, for landing pages and per-product micro-sites. It's very simple, and
seems to work well.

