Ask HN: Simple client websites – What do you use?
For a client, let's say a lawn care company who needs a few pages, maybe a portfolio and email quoting service? I notice a lot of people use Wordpress, but I'm not too familiar with it and it seems like there's a ton for a client to look at (menus/etc..) when they want to go in and change stuff.
I'm a frontend dev (Ruby/Rails + JS [React]), and don't want use a wordpress/php plugins. I also hate their templating system.
How about single page websites? Do you spin up a wordpress just for that?
Also hosting. One VPS for all? Do I host one and charge them or just sign them up for their own hosts with their credit cards?
I have been doing client websites as a side for a while now and I just can't seem to find something that works for ME.
32 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 78.9 ms ] threadI really wonder why there is nothing that really streamlines things for the enduser.
What I want (some of which can be botched in to wp with plugins):
- pretty forms without much php (ACM does the job for wordpress here, but with some PHP)
- lego blocks of form fields, repeatable
- a nice rich text editor
- hide every button that is not necessary
- display instructions next to the editor
A few CMS I tried:
- wordpress: bloated and you still feel the blog inside, no lego blocks, a few strange quirks (try explaining how to make an empty line in the editor, haha)
- Concrete5: (is this still a thing?) the nicest, true inline WYSIWYG editor, but too small (few plugins, back in the day a bit buggy)
- modX: (is this still a thing?) too basic, you don't want to reinvent the wheel
- markdown based flat file CMS': Markdown is just not sufficient, so these have to make a non-markdown header in the files, often just maintainable through a editor interface. Here i tried: yellow CMS and Grav.
- - Grav: quite nice except the mentioned quirks. Really nice image handling, currently not client-friendly but a (payed) admin interface is in the making and might close this gap. Feels a but young here and there (e.g. can push via git, but than need to clear the cache manually in the admin interface)
- - yellow: poorly documented, breaking updates, small
is that what became blogger by google?
Thanks.
In the meantime, I favor WP for small clients for a couple reasons. It is fairly easy to teach them to use and you can lock it down somewhat with user roles. This can help prevent accidental alterations to the layout.
Because WP is fairly common, if for some reason the client moves on from me, the next developer is not handed some custom code they have to figure out.
However, if it is only a 1-2 page site I typically just do a static HTML or simple PHP site depending on needs.
2. For VPS, it is so cheap now, I just give them each a VPS. I just bill out the hosting costs to them each month with a couple extra $$ for "management costs".
I'm a fullstack developer Rails and Laravel and I develop WordPress Sites and Plugins. My main focus is web applications now but I have some legacy clients with basic websites.
WordPress is painful to deal with, most clients don't end up making their own changes with it anyway, it's bloated, has security issues, is slower loading than a Rails/Laravel site.
For you I'd recommend creating the sites in Html/CSS/Rails.
Try to sell your clients on a subscription that includes design, development, hosting and up to once monthly updates of existing content. Have packages that cover up to 5, 10, 15 pages, then as they add pages you can increase their subscription price. This has worked well for me for most clients. I'm sure you could get a high maintenance one here or there that could bombard you with requests for changes. But you can always increase their plan price occasionally if they are becoming a high demand client.
As far as hosting, a $5 digital ocean droplet would be enough for most small business brochure sites, then each one is one their own VPS. You could stack them on one VPS but I like having them on their own.
I use laravel forge to spin up the droplets and deploy repos, it also has build in support for lets encrypt so you can add SSL at no cost.
Good luck getting a system setup that works for you.
For speciality pages or something really complex those are quoted as a one time fee to create them. If they don't take a lot of time I might just create them under the subscription model as well. The clients understand that the per page pricing is for a typical webpage, custom pages, functionality and forms are quoted as they are requested.
Perhaps you could create your own boilerplate project based on your experiences spinning up these for clients.
Bonus points for open sourcing it!
For hosting, for smaller static-ish sites I register a shared hosting account and give the client login, for bigger websites a VPS just for the site, that I charge separately to update, and all ports except 80, 443, 21 and 22 are closed.
I've written a few plugins for it, one specifically for creating albums and galleries for portfolios and I think that it's easy and a straightforward process.
Also I see the admin interface as not client-proof :), they'd get lost and mess it all up.
IMHO blueprints are great for a few simple cases, but anything beyond that requires writing a plugin. And plugins are easy to create and integrate in the Admin panel.
And also the Admin panel can be made client-proof. Panels like Configurations/Themes/Plugins can be easily disabled for individual users.
Now, the hardest part would be the "Pages" section which gives too much control to the client and therefore the ability to mess up the structure of the site. This is something I am currently thinking about solving with another plugin which would allow the client to modify content, without modifying the structure of the pages.
But in general I think that the way grav handles media, assets and routing is awesome and I really enjoy working with it.
Kudos to the grav team :).
Yes, WordPress is bloated and quirky in some ways but it gets the job done, works with every hosting service under the sun and you get plugins for any use case you can imagine.
For my own websites that I know will definitely stay simple I use plain HTML templates and GitHub Pages.
I'd really love to work with someone like yourself to iron out what you're needs are! Drop an email to support at the link above if you'd like to chat more.