Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
I am returning to freelance website work after the end of a lengthy contract in an unrelated field. I am completely disconnected from current best practices on platforms & tools to build and maintain websites.
I have some local and national clients who have requested website overhauls, some from the ground up with a respectable budget (mostly national) and others under the single-page basic web presence umbrella with less money available (mostly local).
If you're a freelancer working with building & maintaining websites, I would like to know more about how you build and maintain them. What's in your toolkit? Server-side, front-side, desktop apps…anything goes.
Thank you.
81 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadIf I need SEO, I'll build using a framework like Nuxt.js or Astro.js and statically generate the output and host in Firebase Hosting. If I don't need SEO, I'll build regular SPAs using React or Vue.
The overall DX is really good compared to Amplify (closest alternative).
Supabase is also promising if you want to work with a relational DB.
Aren’t you having problems with clients wanting to update content on their own?
My use cases have limited customer managed content, but it's not hard to connect SSG to headless CMS for authoring.
I don't recommend non-managed WP these days because of how much effort it takes to keep it from getting compromised.
I think a questions you should ask is "What are the client needs that no-code doesn't serve", and explore that. Or, "What are the technical needs for deploying an hybrid coded+low-code stack", e.g. setting up reverse proxies that combine multiple backends.
Point is, for others — don’t automatically assume well reviewed premium ho$ting is what you need. It may, in fact, be a lot slower.
Any particular recommendations?
As always: download your backups regularly, though.. I have yet to be bitten in this regard (plenty of other instances across 20+ years of doing this kind of stuff). If this is really important to you, automate the download or go with a host that will backup to Google Drive or similar.
If I write a backend, it's in Go. It has nice concurrency primitives that lets me structure code the way I want, and memory is managed safely. Using PostgreSQL to store things.
Hosting is with Firebase or on a Hetzner instance with Docker/Podman containers.
Edit: When on Hetzner: using Traefik as a reverse proxy to handle authentication and TLS.
Does not compute, aka what are you saying?
Otherwise I use Supabase/Firebase for storage and (mostly) Firebase for hosting.
Then hand it over or maintain it for them.
Lately I have been using Framer which is awesome.
Trying to stay away from any JS framework or build system for my sanity.
Language: Typescript.
Frontend Framework: Astrojs [1] or qwik [2]
Frontend Library: React if it requires 3d and other frame-motion like animations, else will not use any frontend library or might throw solidjs if required for some state etc.
Backend: Cloudflare functions, google functions
Auth: Lucia-Auth [3] if required
IDE: VS code with neovim , once deployed to git, I might some time use code-spaces
CSS: DaisyUI [4] with tailwind or Bulma
CSS Library: TailwindUI [5] makes most of the components ready to use and comes from the makers
CMS: Astro content collections or Sanity [6]
Deployment: Cloudflare (Highly preferred) or linode/digitalocean/netlify
Database: turso [7] or neon postgres [8] with (drizzle orm) or cloudflare durable objects
1. https://github.com/withastro/astro
2. https://github.com/BuilderIO/qwik
3. https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia
4. https://github.com/saadeghi/daisyui
5. https://tailwindui.com/
6. https://www.sanity.io/
7. https://turso.tech/
8. https://neon.tech/
Also huge fan of firebase and their emulators and whole eco-system.
I appreciate seeing what stacks work for other people, and also very much appreciate the illustration of how NOT homogenous things actually are out there in the world (despite certain blogs and developer influencers trying to convince you otherwise)
I'm going to try out Astro!
Want to throw in Remix into this list. It’s been a breath of fresh air compared to many convoluted systems these days.
Do you mean VS code with a plugin that makes it look and feel like neovim, or is there a way to make both clients edit the same buffer at the same time?
The TS/JS ecosystem is just much larger and that comes with newer libraries, tools and has better support. Getting setup with a basic CRUD rails app is quick, but the more advanced work; auth, deployments, scale, etc. can be frustrating for newcomers.
Not a fan of how they’re going all in on Hotwire. Although I haven’t been following those advancements much lately.
They really need to have some easy way to just roll their api only mode with a stand alone frontend, along with documentation on configuring that.
You just can’t beat the proficiency of using the same types on front and backend. I did enjoy trying out redwoodjs.
I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with tons of support and libraries, django, rails, phoenix, et al. Minimize the use of JS libraries/frameworks or remove altogether, forget about fads that mix markup with javascript and logic, and even style (these days). Do not build stuff based on a web browser just so you can call it multi-platform, you will end up shipping a crappy abstraction with a poor UI and even worse performance, because remember, you are playing solo, cant afford the optimizations of large product teams, be pragmatic... deployments/CICD/devops DIY, don't trust services that advertise themselves as a panacea for deployments, remember Heroku f* everyone sideways... learn and use stuff like Dokku or Kamal...
In many cases this sounds better than shipping for only one platform - or not shipping at all.
I'm doing that right now. I'm having enough troubles with payment integration and proper auth and back end stuff, there's no way I could ship for web and two different mobile platforms at all without cutting too many corners.
Can you elaborate please? I hosted an API on heroku recently. I have no problem so far. Should I be concerned?
0: https://help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/removal-of-heroku-free-prod...
Mostly I just use Django alone with nothing on top, not even a frontend framework.
I implemented a few custom authentication classes for things like group permissions on read / write for shared projects internally and just hooking this all up means I can write huge new modules that “just” slot in, in just a few hours. IMO they have the abstraction layers just right, it makes me really productive.
Laravel has "Spark" which is a Saas specific starter kit you can utilize too.
PHP is easy to deploy, easy to host, and easy to sub-contract work out. It's really reliable, well understood, developers are low cost, very stable, etc.
I cannot think of a simpler setup. I'm not even a minimalist, I just can't stand Windows and Apple. Annoying software, blegh. Or paying thousands of bucks for a more powerful computer that I don't need. The RPi4 just works. Quick enough. And then it gets out of the way.
What I would like to see is a shrinked code overview to fit the full vertical size of the scroll bar. And some way to find selected occurrences in other files in the code base (same directory, possibly other files).
For those of your clients who requested website overhauls, they'll probably prefer to keep their new websites on the same location, as their own hosting, usually it's a cPanel hosting account, like HostGator or GoDaddy, so WordPress is a first choice, if you (and they?) enjoy using it.
But as you mentioned they're local businesses, with limited budget and needs for basic web presence, they would probably love to manage their websites on their own and WordPress may look scary for most of the less technical users. You can try Kopage (https://kopage.com), similar to WordPress, it can be self-hosted, but it works in the cloud in the first place. And it's free.
A little disclaimer: Kopage is one of my projects, and this was the exact reason it was created in the first place, as a tool as user-friendly and intuitive as possible for our own clients, so they can manage their own websites and don't be afraid to break something.
There's a white-label plan if you'd like to offer it under your own brand.
The clients are happy, if they get to the point where they want to manage the content themselves, and for less than $300/yr they get hosting, access to a payment processor if they need it, and domain renewal. It's been a no-brainer.
I spent my "new technology budget" on upgrading most of my projects to vite, which already kind of annoyed me, but it does seem a tad faster than Webpack and keeps my projects from bitrotting away so, eh.
I actually increased my use of React in the last year or so by using it to render to HTML/PDF on the back-end now as well, combining it with weasyprint or puppeteer to pump out the final PDF's.
To be clear: I currently try to build everything web related (websites, static pages, webapps, PDF's, electron apps) with React now.
Everything lives as scripts. Only Next UI is developed from scratch for each customer.
https://wpengine.com/support/sync-new-post-and-pages/#Import...
I had to scroll up a bit to see the heading. They couldn't figure out how to jump to the #anchor apparently no one is actually looking at the new user experience. This wouldn't happen to me. It just wouldn't.
https://5help.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/204965388-Im....
I would not make links like: 5help.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/204965388-Importing-Blogger-or-WordPress-blog-posts#:~:text=Log%20into%20your%20Squarespace%205%20site.%20In%20the,URL%20that%20visitors%20use%20to%20visit%20that%20blog. but there it is. Ready for consumption.
https://webflow.com/updates/csv-import
Seems good enough if you can find the page.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/im...
Along with a long list of expensive plugins they will need if they want to keep the custom functionality. It will lack some thing but have other things that hopefully somewhat make up for it.
One should also have a new terms of service and user agreement ready in case of migration.
You see? If you prepare for it clients can downgrade whenever they like and everything becomes a nail.
> You should be delivering something to them that it easy to maintain and document. If they need to get somebody in to help in 5 years, they shouldn't need to find a be full-stack web-app developer.
Privately I call it the bus factor heist. It is when you get paid or promise to do something then quickly die before having to do the work.
To avoid or at least remedy that I have some documents and some code to help the next dev migrate things. A platform might also have some feature that is hard or impossible to replicate. Say they end up using other software that only plays well with specific platforms. Ideally there would also be a way back to the custom website.
I'm not saying you are wrong but people (like myself) are already invested in the mistake.
For example: I calculate a very low delivery cost by town or neighborhood name. It's very simple as the radius doesn't involve many places and they never move or change name. Addresses in the longest village in the country has only one street and the distance ranges from 0.5 to 10km. If the customer lives there it needs to be slightly more specific.
I think on shopify this could be replaced with easyroutes[1] But woah! That thing brings a bazillion features that are not needed. It's wonderful but not mission critical. I'm not even sure if it can match the existing implementation. Is it worth $450/month?
Some things melt, some expire fast, some food stuffs are fragile. The drivers know to get rid of the expensive wedding cake first and drive slowly. Easyroutes amazingly efficient route planner is simply not needed. However accurate I cant make schedules from that.
[1] - https://www.roundtrip.ai/easyroutes/pricing
Some sites are dead simple, with an SQLite data store, and static content served directly. Some apps are running on AWS ECS, auto scaling up to hundreds of VMs in response to bursty workloads.
Generally though, I’m running docker compose for local development environments, and docker swarm in production. (Until autoscaling requires something like ECS)
Docker makes it easy to define everything in code. (A redis instance, worker instances vs web instances, db, etc)
99% of the time there isn't this service can't do.
Tier 1 (just need a basic site): Use the built-in website builders from their domain provider or hosted static site generators, like GoDaddy, Github Pages, etc.
Tier 2 (need plugins or ecommerce): If they require some more functionality like email lists or selling products then use services like Wordpress, Squarespace, or Shopify to build their site.
Tier 3 (extra data complexity): For sites that have more structured data that is not satisfied with tier 2, then use something like Webflow or Framer. These allow you to add more data types and categories to build unique pages.
Tier 4 (custom app) If they are building something unique that is complicated to build with the previous tiers, then my preferred stack to use is Django, Django Rest Framework, HTMX, Tailwind. Django-cms or Wagtail are also proven CMS to help build their site.
You should also consider serverless apps like Google Cloud Run or AWS Fargate so you don't worry too much about the infrastructure unless it is absolutely necessary to roll your own.
Tier 5 (a little bit of everything): Combine tiers with subdomains. For example, build their blog or marketing site on webflow, but have a custom API or an authenticated interface with a Django/DRF backend.
Ultimately, you need to see what level of technology your client is comfortable with and how you want to leave the project as your contract ends. Don't try to build a overtly complicated system that will give you more headaches later when the client calls on you again.
* Webflow (in case the client needs something relatively unsophisticated)
* Django / HTMX / AlpineJS / Django Ninja (in case the client needs a full CRUD application with more powerful capabilities).
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