Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitxbit | Hacker News Reader

I will be honest, I didn’t think Wordpress would last this long. However, there are some great (free) alternatives to getting a website up and running. Google Sites is one not mentioned in the article. It can handle basic needs for most people without technical skills. Speed is not the greatest however. With something like Tailwind CSS it’s very easy to create a static webpage to host on Github/Netlify.

View on HN

I like Tailwind a lot, but for anyone else reading, you still need to purge css classes to not end up with a very large css file (187kB gzipped) [1]. This requires a build step with PurgeCSS. (I haven't checked, but maybe Netlify offers a build step that will do this for you...)

I also like Tachyons [2] for utility-based classes, which is pretty small (14kB gzipped).

[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/controlling-file-size

[2]: http://tachyons.io/

Wordpress will probably outlast most of the alternatives mentioned in this thread, including every static site generator. It's too cheap, powerful, flexible and easy to use to disappear. Also, the Wordpress devs do actually make radical new changes to it to keep up with the times, like introducing the visual eidtor Gutenberg or moving towards a headless Wordpress.

Yep. It's too big to fail - even if Automattic goes belly-up the community would keep WordPress afloat for years.

"I didn’t think Wordpress would last this long"

Same here.

Funny thing is, just a week ago I read that some people would say WP is "no code". I had the impression almost all of WP's success was based on countless web agencies coding customizations for it.

It's because there are countless plugins and whatnot that WP to a lot of people is a hassle free installation, similar to "no code", or at least very little code.

Page builders have come a long way, a lot of agencies will use something like Elementor now because designers can effectively build a lot of pages in real time as opposed to doing the traditional psd->custom theme route.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com