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Ask HN: How to make a simple business website?

A plumber friend has asked me how to make a basic website for people to see on Google search results, which as a SWE of >10 years lands right in the middle of "Things it sounds like I should know" and "Things I don't know". I'm just not sure which DIY tool to recommend.

I can look into this, but figured you all would know best. What should we use?

Thanks!

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To be completely honest? WordPress. It will cost you around $70 to buy a theme that looks 80% of the way there and all you have to do is change the placeholder images and text. And the same goes for plugins, for this kind of a "basic" project every single plugin you need is going to be free.

I don't know it's worth spending your own time trying to create something custom or mess around with website builders because in the end it will cost a lot more than that $70 for a premium theme.

That said, it will be a few hours (2 or 3 maybe?) to set everything up.

But that's just my opinion.

WordPress would be my reconmendation too. As someone who builds websites for these kinds of businesses daily, it allows people to get online quickly in a way which works.

More than anything get some decent hosting (i.e not EIG group/GoDaddy)

(If it's too much effort - more than happy to discuss further - website on profile)

Thanks so much! Based on recommendations I'm between Wordpress and Wix right now. Wix seems to be slightly more user-friendly, which my plumber friend will really appreciate, but maybe these premium Wordpress themes are the ticket.

Definitely don't make someone not techie use WordPress. It has a lot of UX issues that are hard to understand, compounded with endless marketing for Jetpack and caches and plug-ins and themes and always needing updates. I've set up dozens of those for friends and small business and it's a way bigger headache than you think. Just use Wix. It's set and forget. WordPress is not.

Your plumber doesn't need a blog, just a business page. Wix excels at that. WordPress is terrible at it, even with a custom theme, because the underlying engine is designed around blogs.

And don't host it yourself. Buy Wordpress hosting (there are big, reputable players besides wordpress.com as well), they come with premium themes, updates and security fixes managed by the hoster, same for backups.

If the goal is for the plumber to be able to setup and maintain it on his own then I'd recommend wix or squarespace. Otherwise wordpress as mentioned in the other comment.

Don't DIY it. Whatever you do today will be hard to maintain in two years. You don't want to be the person he always calls for helps for updates.

Just have him put it on Wix or Squarespace or Square business or such.

Don't mess with WordPress either. Not worth the complexity for a simple business page.

This is good advice - to clarify, when I said "DIY" I meant "DIY for him" haha. Wix has gotten a few votes here, sounds like that's the way to go. Thank you!

Yeah, especially if it's DIY for him and not you, the pagebuilders excel at that. Wix is my personal favorite, but also check out Squarespace, the completely unrelated Square business pages (especially if he already uses Square to handle payments), Weebly, etc. It's a moderately-sized space with a few established players.

What these services do that Wordpress does NOT do is abstract away the whole stack and manage all of it for the user. Your plumber pays a tiny monthly fee ($10-$20) and all he ever has to worry about is look and feel, as in he chooses a theme, adds some text and images and contact info... and done. He'll never have to worry about hosting or updates or plug-ins or "post vs page" or hierarchies of nav menus or "invalidating a cache" or "updating the database" or any of the other low-level stuff that Wordpress still makes painfully obvious.

Nothing against Wordpress, it's a powerful FOSS solution and what gave me my start in web dev, it's just no longer the best tool for the job. I've migrated several clients from Wordpress to Wix and they are MUCH happier. Wordpress will inevitably incur maintenance costs a year or two after deployment, and they'll either have to ask you back to help or hire another dev then. Even hosted on Wordpress.com with a lot of the power features disabled, it's still way too low-level compared to the actual page builder services.

Depends exactly what you need. If the site only needs to provide a bit of info about the business plus a contact form, then just about any CMS or site builder would be perfect here. WordPress could do this, SquareSpace or Wix could do this, and heck, you could even do it manually just by buying/finding a template (maybe a Bootstrap one?) and coding a few static pages. As long as you don't do anything obviously disastrous for SEO (like say, making it entirely reliant on a poorly coded SPA, sticking your text in images, not including title tags, etc), it should work perfectly fine regardless of what you do.

You'd probably want to choose the CMS or site builder if your plumber friend wants to actually maintain the site and add content though.

I’ve helped multiple non-technical people successfully make squarespace sites. It has the option to buy a domain and the fees are cheap. It’s totally worth the site builder and included themes.

For a free option, The new Google sites is not bad [1].

[1] https://sites.google.com/

Was looking for this comment and was also not surprised by the reply that Google will disable it.

Google sites is a great service, that started about 20 years ago. It won't get killed.

Except they'd probably graveyard it in a year or two...

IMHO Google is the LAST company you'd want to trust with a simple small-business site. They will often release something and never update it again, and offer zero support for any issues you might run into.

If you can't even pay them for it, they have zero incentive to improve it.

I use mobirise.com to create + Firebase hosting (free for low volume).

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