All I want to do is build a web site.<p><pre><code> apt-get install nginx
vi /var/www/index.html
</code></pre>
Poof.<p>I find the writeup similarly misleading.<p>"all I want to do is build a web site"...<p>"... hosted on google apps..".<p>... manage content<p>... collaborate among team members<p>... CMSy stuff.<p>So in other words, all you want to do is build a pipelined <i>product</i>. Which is totally cool - but it's definitely not just building a web site.
"These days, the person doing the development is often different from the person doing the visual design, is different from the person structuring the content, is different from the person actually writing the content, is different from the person reviewing the launch, is different from the person writing the check to pay for the whole thing"<p>...uhhh, not unless you work in a bloated enterprise shop. Most of the time, it's a one to three person show and one person CAN do it all (albeit maybe not everything equally perfect). I launch websites (whole platforms actually) - from server to web services to content - all the time, every few days. It is entirely possible and you get accustomed to it.
Err, I'd say that it's getting easier then ever for one person to build a website by themselves.<p>- Rails/Angular go a long way to speeding up development due to the number of 3rd party libraries available for them. Need User logins? Devise. Need queue processing? Sidekiq. AngularJS is going the same way as Rails for awesome 3rd party libraries.<p>- Bootstrap almost solves visual design for prototypes, and it's not hard to start customising the templates or even buying a 3rd party one off the shelf. It's not going to win any awards for graphic design but it's fine for 99% of people that will be using your site.<p>Case in point, I built <a href="http://www.knowyourgenre.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.knowyourgenre.com</a>, as site for exploring music by genres, in around 3 months (with a lot of backtracking and taking bits out that I didn't wind up using).<p>1 person, I did the front end, back end and graphic design for it.<p>Not to say that grow is a bad idea, but I don't agree with the argument that 1 person can't build a site anymore, in fact I think it's getting easier.
Ok, stepping back and critiquing here, the call to action falls hard on the fact that 'website' doesn't have a common enough definition.<p>It is in fact <i>trivial</i> to build a web site, one person. My sister did it (not technical) went to WPEngine.com got the basic package, went to name.com and got a domain that wasn't taken yet, and added Google apps for the email component. Boom, "web site" and she is very non-technical, but she does know how to use a search engine.<p>Then there are the Geo/NeoCitites type things - also pretty trivial. And new entrant Ghost, also easy to do for one person.<p>Then there are the Github Pages, Dropbox pages, and Google Drive pages (and Google Sites for that matter, an unwanted love child with Jot).<p>If you are actually modestly technical then it gets even easier.<p>So that whole "its rocket science" meme doesn't really fly and that takes away from the whole 'this is hard we're here to help' theme.
There are tons of website builders that allow you to create simple (to rather complex) websites nowadays. Squarespace, Jimdo, Wix to name a few can be great tools depending on your needs. No technical skills required, content creation and publication tend to be pretty accessible and all the hosting and domain name handling is usually fully taken care of.<p>I'm myself working for a French startup called Pikock[1] that is working hard on the next iteration of its drag-and-drop website builder. We're trying to make it as simple, efficient and streamlined as possible so that everyone gets a shot beyond the tech-savvy. Our core vision is that everyone, no matter the skill level is entitled to a presence online if they so choose.<p>Ultimately I want my 65-year old mom to be able to create content and share it with the world, even though there might not be an audience for her collection of hand-painted pebbles :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.pikock.com/en" rel="nofollow">http://www.pikock.com/en</a>
Yeah I'm always surprised about how hard it is to put a website online.<p>I think there's a market for a service helping a team getting started on the right foot.<p>It could start with a popular stack of services and frameworks, let's say:
- Github, Heroku, S3, node.js, angular, grunt, bower, yo, bootstrap, etc etc.<p>And just make it dead simple to have it configured and deployed.<p>Now, all these services are awesome by themselves, but they all require their own quirks and quacks to work together which makes it a real pain to get started.
All I want to do is build a website!<p>Oh, and it should have a nice menu system for doing things related to the site when on a page.<p>Oh, and it should respond to the device and browser of the person using it, with the layout and functionality adjusting accordingly.<p>Oh, and the images should be the appropriate size for that device, because we don't want users on cellular networks to have to download large images.<p>Oh, and it should display for them in their preferred language. And without having to choose the language from a menu. Don't tell me about this internationali-whatsit and local-whoozits, I said <i>it should display in their language</i>! (God, you developers are annoying.)<p>Oh, and it should mirror the smoothness of the native applications of the user's device.<p>Oh, and it should be built on roughly the same technologies which websites have been using for the last 15 years. And I don't want to hear about "HTML is a system for describing documents, not applications" or "CSS is for styling documents, it's not a layout engine".<p>Yeah, you know, jeez, why is this so hard????? Everyone is stupid and in my way.
I thought this was going to be an argument for simplicity but then it started talking about complex things. Git and SASS and Python and whatnot are great, but if you <i>just</i> want to build a website, like in the Good Old Days, surely <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a> does the trick. Put HTML files in your 10MB of space.<p>This sounds like a friendlier Heroku and may well turn out to be brilliant, but it is still a lot more than just building a website.
When I made our wedding website, I wrote a short python cgi script to push markdown files through a parser and paste them into a template. Then I wrote a CSS file to make it pretty, and popped that up with a static HTML home page on NearlyFreeSpeech behind CloudFlare. We're talking about 27 lines of python, 62 lines of HTML, and 135 lines of CSS.<p>My point here isn't that people should do exactly what I did. Rather, my point is that most of a web developer's job is finding the right components and then writing a little bit of code to glue them together. Stop looking for some special system that holds your hand like a toddler through every step of every process, and just write some damned code to do the thing you need done.<p>I personally don't believe in learning and deploying an entire framework to save less than 250 lines of code.
This is precisely why web-hosting providers exist. You can find someone to host most of the common CMSs, you can certainly find a company that will run a web server on your behalf (so you can deploy a static site). If you really want a tuned WordPress installation there's WPEngine.<p>If you don't want to deal with the installation and configuration of the underlying software, don't lease a VPS or any other type of server ... lease a "service".<p>EDIT: I completely forgot about sites like Weebly. You don't even have any research to do with this type of solution as you just use what you're given.
I'm working on something that's sort of the opposite called Strapper[1]. The thing is, when I'm trying to launch a new product, I don't even want to build a website. It's a huge distraction. And I don't want to build on a CMS like Wordpress, because I'll just have to replace it with Rails when the project scope grows.<p>Different strokes for different folks though. What someone needs to build a blog or portfolio is going to be different from what you need to build a startup.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.strapper.io" rel="nofollow">http://www.strapper.io</a>
I think your messaging could be a bit more clear. What you do is pretty abstract. After reading the article and your landing page, I'm not actually sure what your product does or why I would want it.
If someone doesn't like the "modern" way of building websites, or thinks that it requires so much more work than the old way - then I recommend they try the old way.<p>The modern way is much more efficient.