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Comment by scrapcode | Hacker News Reader

Since we're here - what are people using these days to prop a quick web property up for a friend, for example, that's not such a PITA?

I recently told a friend I'd throw up a site for him for his dog grooming business, and naturally went to WP. I figured I'd just a simple free theme that was close and modify it to my liking if possible and it was anything but trivial. Free basic themes take a lot of digging to find, they're built on two(?) Wordpress theme-builders, or maybe some other proprietary theme, often include other weird addons, etc... I don't remember it being so convoluted- but I guess I am getting old in this space.

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I send friends + family to Squarespace for simple websites, or Shopify for e-commerce. Works well!.

Squarespace has design templates, a gallery of blocks, domains (what's a DNS?), news section, email marketing, signup forms etc. all built-in making it easy and one-stop

Shopify is Shopify and doesn't need much of an introduction.

Squarespace is comically overpriced for a simple site. I don't understand why people recommend it so soften for "non-technical family member needs an essentially static site."

The https://neocities.org/supporter tier gets you a custom domain for $5/mo and is as usable as MySpace. https://zume.net/ gets you WordPress for $5/mo which makes for a quick migration.

> Squarespace is comically overpriced for a simple site.

Most customers are SMB's and $20-30 a month is nothing, considering how critical websites are. It's a third of the price of accounting software and gets you a day of Google or Facebook ads. The old alternatives of Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising would run 10x+ that.

> The https://neocities.org/supporter tier gets you a custom domain for $5/mo and is as usable as MySpace. https://zume.net/ gets you WordPress for $5/mo

No offence but I'm not sending either of those sites to anybody not a techie or a nerd. cPanel, NVMe, SSL certificates? That's _after_ you get through the confusing choices on the homepage of premium, managed, virtual server?

It needs to be easy to use and understand like opening and using Microsoft Word. That's what the online choices are.

My brother has barely typed up a letter since high school and I sent him to Squarespace. Without even asking me anything, he had a great looking website up in a day with a domain, logo and everything.

Multiple non-technical friends setup businesses (especially during lockdowns) and almost all got on with setting up Shopify with zero assistance from me.

I value my time more than anything - $20-50 a month is nothing and the results are better.

Sometimes you just need to get into and understand the mindset of 90%+ of potential users and what they need. That's why these companies are household names and I've never heard of either site you sent me - and I'm _very_ online.

Well Squarespace is a household name because 90% of their operating budget is ads repeating their name over and over. But yes for an SMB the difference between $5/mo and $30/mo is nothing and Squarespace does have a nice onboarding process. But for an individual $5/mo and $30/mo is a completely different tier of service. The kinds of things people use personal sites for is not worth 1.5 Netflix subscriptions.

If you’re looking for something low effort but nice looking, Squarespace does a nice job. It can be frustrating if you’re trying to do something really custom — though you can likely make it happen if you’re stubborn enough.

If you’re looking for something you can really build from the ground up easily with, then my go-to is Craft CMS. You need to do things by hand, but it’s easy to build out data models, and the system is sane and easy to predict.

I'll add to the chorus in favor of Squarespace.

A few years back I helped my 70-year-old father-in-law (who's not remotely technical) get set up with a Squarespace site for a project of his and after initial configuration he was able to run it himself for years. At the time the big reason why I picked it over WordPress was that I knew that I'd be on the hook for maintaining a WordPress site. He just needed something he could post on occasionally and mostly forget about, and Squarespace worked great for that.

Ask one of the ai tools like stackblitz or v0 or cursor or replit or ... and deploy to whatever the default thing it for them.

I'd look at Squarespace first, and then Webflow.

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