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Comment by haiku2077 | Hacker News Reader

haiku2077

If you can't hire someone overseas to make a website, probably run your business off a facebook/instagram page. A lot of small businesses around me do that.

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If you're going to answer their question then why not suggest a solution that results in a website one controls, instead of some very basic "use facebook" suggestion. Facebook and other social media for a business are all good ideas, because as a business, eyeballs is what you want and that means putting up your presence wherever they're found in a way that's relevant to you.

However, any self respecting business owner planning for a stable long-term presence should absolutely also have their own website, and have it made to be as independent, simple and easy to maintain as possible in the context of its technical needs.

And how does one do that if one has neither web development skills nor a budget to hire a dev? What WYSIWYG tool would you use? All of the simple static site tools I know of require at least HTML and CSS knowledge.

I honestly don't quite know, but i'm going to research this more carefully and comment back, because it's something I need too, especially if I can keep my site easy but at the same time outside the clutches of some walled garden platform of total service, and total underlying control.

Isn’t that still walled-garden garbage, just without the WYSIWYG part?

I hate this response! Businesses that rely on shitty facebook crap don’t get my business. And hiring someone to make a brochureware website is a maintenance nightmare. Do you work with small businesses much?

I'm not advocating for it, I'm just saying what people in my community do.

Many of the best (and successful) restaurants near me don't have websites, for example.

In some places people run their businesses almost entirely through chat apps like whatsapp or wechat. Works great for businesses based around client relationships.

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