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Comment by muhammadusman | Hacker News Reader

Recently, while talking to a friend who hosts her website on Wix, I noticed that she was using it as a portfolio website and I asked what wix-specific features she was using and her answer was "domain management" and this got me thinking...what if the steps were pretty straight-forward, could someone who is not a web dev or technical get a website up on github? So I started putting together a template that looks very similar to her website and also includes instructions on how to host it on Github Pages for $0/year versus what she is currently paying Wix at around $100/year. The template is here: https://github.com/usmanity/rose

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Just let her use the tool designed for her demographic and you use the tool designed for yours.

There’s no harm at all in putting effort into building a tool which might suit the former, on top of the latter. That’s more or less how all software for non-technical people is built: simplifying a more complex technical solution to make it accessible for the intended audience.

My partner (who is very non-technical) went through registering a domain, making a Github account, installing VS Code, slapping some HTML together by hand, and putting most of these things together before she even mentioned to me that she wants a website.

Of course it took us a bit more work to polish it, but 90% of the work was hers (I helped with things like setting up Hugo, Netlify, writing some template code, fixing the CSS on mobile, etc).

The biggest pain point of making a static website is just wrangling the generator. We wanted an image gallery with a couple selected works showcased on the front page, and the combination of various Hugo features to achieve that exact effect turned out to be non-obvious. There was probably a way to make it simpler, but we haven't found the time to find it.

I think most non-technical people can easily get the first 90% of the work done by themselves with the currently available tools, it's just the other 90% where you find yourself struggling ;)

(https://alida.gallery/)

"Prerequisites

-Github account

-Familiarity with markdown (learn more here)

-Ability to run node.js and npm on your computer

-Optional: a domain name."

Definitely not the same as using Wix, and definitely not usable for non-technical people.

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