Comment by PinkPigeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PinkPigeon | Hacker News Reader

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It's so interesting to see just how successful WordPress is. Among developers especially. I look at small business websites all around where I live and it's all WordPress and every single one was made by yet another wordpress-shop that does nothing but setup WordPress for people. It's a huge ecosystem.

And you know what I have learned by talking to these businesses? It's that WordPress is still not easy enough to use for non techy people.

Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time.

I'm running pinkpigeon.co.uk, which tries to actually make websites easy enough to use for everyone. But I am actually running into a problem where people expect all websites to be like WordPress and the first thing you hear is "oh I don't want to learn another thing". It's only when I show them the system, that they go "oh wow, that really is a lot easier". The problem is trying to convince anyone of this remotely via the Internet. Much easier to do in person.

I have the utmost respect for WordPress and used it much myself, but at the moment it's challenging to have to be compared against it when simpler solutions exist.

>Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time.

i think it's a mistake to believe that this is a problem to be solved, or that the reason people don't want to touch their website is just a "fear of doing something wrong". it's not a question of how easy the admin panel is to use - the vast network of people willing to handle wordpress sites is a feature of wordpress. a business owner doesn't want to deal with their website, they want to pay somebody else to do it for them. tech people like self-serve solutions that they can log in and administer themselves, but there's a whole lot of people who really don't want that - they want to just call somebody up, explain what they want, and have it taken care of. the reason wordpress runs 40% of the internet is because it delivers that experience.

What baffles me is that huge portion of those small business websites have absolutely no need for Wordpress or any backend altogether. At best they need some static site generator and a CI/CD pipeline maintained by the provider to rebuild the site if it is an actual blog, which is not that common.

How are the small businesses supposed to update their websites, if there is no backend? You can't expect them to write HTML.

Not sure if suitable WYIWYG editors are still around, or if Word exports to HTML have become usable.

" or if Word exports to HTML have become usable"

I doubt there is beauty to be found.

And websites are a lot about beauty.

Businesses, even very capable with web dev, update their websites very rarely. Businesses want to update the content, which is different. Static site generators are built exactly for that.

Can I open an app on my phone to create/update a post? Can I Use my phone to create another user so a friend can guest-post on my blog? Can I send an email to a certain address to publish a new post?

Nope

Now you just take things a blogging platform can do and try to morph that into an argument against static site generators. The very point of static site generators is to drop a whole host of functionality.

How often does a construction/handyman "online flyer" webpage need a change? Once a year, maybe. The primary point I am trying to make is that websites of a lot of small business (obviously ones that are not webshops) serve more or less static content and therefore have no need for a backend at all.

You have a food blog where you publish recipes/reviews daily? Surely a blogging platform is a much better fit for you. You have a restaurant page where you publish contacts, coordinates and a menu which changes every second year? Well, maybe a static site generator is a better fit.

You say that, but what if they want to add GA? Or an image gallery? Or a chat box?

Those are just some examples that with Wordpress, it's a click and pretty much plug and play. With the static site generator you're proposing, you quickly need to do coding yourself.

If you buy website development service you do not necessarily care whether the provider writes custom code for WP or static site generator.

Why do you need a backend for GA or image gallery?

Because you don't want to keep paying ongoing fees for new development when it could be as easy as installing a plugin.

But image gallery does not need any "additional development". All it needs is frontend code to display the gallery nicely, some storage mechanism and a "manifest" of sorts with relevant metadata of the gallery.

If that is a photo-sharing website, then yes, proper backend is needed. But for a portfolio website of a photographer, which gets updated once a month at best, static manifest will work wonders.

I love the idea that "frontend code" is somehow not "additional development". Have fun with your "manifest" and "metadata".

I equally love the idea that hiring a web agency to build a wordpress template is somehow entirely different thing from hiring a web agency to build a not-wordpress template.

The frontend code which eventually renders the image gallery does not care whether fetched image list is produced by PHP code or is served by http server directly from filesystem.

> But image gallery does not need any "additional development". All it needs is frontend code to display the gallery nicely, some storage mechanism and a "manifest" of sorts with relevant metadata of the gallery

I can't tell if u missed a /s or genuinely think that isn't additional dev.

> At best they need some CI/CD pipeline maintained by the provider

My business requires a what now?

Missed a part. A static site generator with build/deploy happening on provider's infra.

> A static site generator with build/deploy happening on provider's infra.

“Say what now? Where do I login to update a photo on the site?”

In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the combined practices of continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment.[1]

In short everything has to be continuous, otherwise you'll stall and die. Now go buy some CI/CD from the shop.

[1] wikipedia

Cool. Now imagine I’m a business owner that makes and sells my own socks and happen to need a website to do so. What you’re talking about would still make zero sense to me.

I should have added it was sarcasm :(

> At best they need some static site generator and a CI/CD pipeline maintained by the provider to rebuild the site if it is an actual blog, which is not that common.

What most people want is to have something that works, where they can focus on their content and not on your tools. Wordpress works for people.

If they get a CI/CD pipeline maintained by someone, how do they create pages, get updates, fix those pesky security issues, write a blog post on their mac that when saved automatically gets posted? How easy is it to apply a theme to your CI/CD pipeline? Your tools work for you, but are you going to maintain them with the same level of features as Wordpress?

Oops, it's holiday time, will you write a greeting card plugin for your CI/CD pipeline for them to purchase cards on their website and send site-specific cards to their email list by Monday? No? Sorry, they just switched off of your CI/CD pipeline to Wordpress.

When moving to a different hosting provider, people want to conduct business not learn a to use a new CI/CD pipeline to match the tools at the new hosting company.

What about when you get tired of updating their site generator code for them? They will need to start over, and they won't pick another CI/CD tool that's unmaintained and is expected to get horribly outdated after a year.

People go into business in order to conduct business.

And they will want to automatically publish to twitter/facebook, integrate shopify on the site, some forms, etc...

Wordpress has 1 click install for all those things as plugins (or work out-of-the-box)

"Joe's porchbuilding" does not send automated greetings. They want a website that is discoverable on Google by new clients and can display their pitch, everything else is negotiated on phone or by email anyway. You only need to worry about security issues if you build such a site on top of a dynamic platform. The updates and security issues disappear if you serve factually static content as static content.

Static site generators are bad for dynamic websites, but that does not mean you have to try and fit a whole dynamic platform into a static website. Different use cases, different tools.

> "Joe's porchbuilding" does not send automated greetings.

And, that's false. Unless you make them run one of your restricted platforms that doesn't have the features they want and need for their business.

Wordpress runs 60% of CMS websites. 15% of the most viewed websites run Wordpress.

> You only need to worry about security issues if you build such a site on top of a dynamic platform.

Do you actually believe that there are no security issues with static websites?

Thank you for the conversation, but I'm going back to running my business.

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