Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

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/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

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

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.

May I be in the beta program please?

Me too beta, pretty please!

Me too? 3rd times the charm?

I second Hugo as a static website generator. I've been using Jekyll for a long time, but it is just too slow for a nice workflow, especially as the site/blog grows to more than a handful of pages.

Hugo is blazingly fast, has a very active community and has all the features you need. Also it's just a single binary and very easy to use.

You could use a CI system like Travis CI or Gitlab CI to automatically build the site and deploy it to a preview website on pushes.

For static pages Amazon is a great hosting alternative. Use S3 + CloudFront for cheap/free hosting that's infinitely scalable. Managing HTTPS is simple as well with Amazon's Certificate Manager. When I set up my blog I used this instruction: https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/host-static-site-aws...

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.)

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

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/.

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

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.

> Please let me know if Hugo (and others) solves the "recompilation" issue to rebuild the site each time,

Is that really a big problem?

All my static sites get built by CI, not locally.

Push a change via git, system takes care of the rest.

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.

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

What did your pipeline look like? I just push a commit and let the runners handle it for Jekyll.

Keep in mind by using WordPress you are also setting yourself up for possible defacement that seems to break out once a year when someone finds the new big hole in a popular plugin or WordPress itself.

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.

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.

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.

Static and markdown is the simplest I know.

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

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/

https://www.atlantic.net/blog/october-cms/

http://www.archybold.com/blog/post/laravel-vs-october-cms-di...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would leverage your existing knowledge but avoid WordPress, and instead use Grav (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).

github pages. redirect your domain name. easy.

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

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

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/) or Contentful (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.

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.