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What's the simplest way to build a website?

15 points by alhenaworks ↗ HN
What tech is best suited for a 1 person team trying to build a website these days? The less moving parts, the better. Where's the iphone of web development? Is there a simple solution yet, even for a technical solo founder who would rather not manage 1000 different components?

11 comments

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angersock
It depends greatly on what you want the website to do.

If it's just a simple informational website, weebly is handy.

If you need to do simple e-commerce, check out Shopify.

Animats
Wordpress on a Wordpress hosting service, probably.
asimjalis
Use Firebase.io for the back-end. Use JavaScript or ClojureScript for the front-end. Use Semantic-UI or Bootstrap for HTML/CSS.
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siquick
Squarespace is hard to beat if you want a static site.
Mz
What do you mean by "build a website"?

There are plenty of off the shelf website services. I have done WordPress. I have done self hosted HTML files with includes files. I currently use BlogSpot exclusively and like that. But it actually took a bit to understand the degree to which I can customize it and what all I can do with it. Initially, I thought the templates worked like the templates in WordPress work. Nope. Not remotely.

Nothing is without a learning curve of some sort.

cdvonstinkpot
Wordpress can be made to do just about anything easily with their vast repo of plugins. 97Cents.net has super-basic hosting for <$10/year- good for MVP & development. WP can be migrated without that much effort when you grow into something with real traffic. There's quite a few decent free themes, & you can get most any task you get stuck on on Fiverr for <$15.
amac
Wordpress or Squarespace. Both are hosted. Wordpress is especially nice as you can export and deploy your own self-hosted site with all of your content later.