All I want to do is build a web site
about.grow.io
about.grow.io
apt-get install nginx
vi /var/www/index.html
I find the writeup similarly misleading.
"all I want to do is build a web site"...
"... hosted on google apps..".
... manage content
... collaborate among team members
... CMSy stuff.
So in other words, all you want to do is build a pipelined product. Which is totally cool - but it's definitely not just building a web site.
Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.
Almost daily I have friends/family come to me with a business idea that starts off as "it will be easy.. just like <huge site> but with blah".
Non-tech people honestly think 'websites' are simple things, and we should be able to knock-out a Facebook or Twitter clone in a few days.
I'm really surprised that people actually look at the websites of multi-million dollar internet-only companies and think it must be easy to build something worth that much.
After all, who do you know that has paid to use them?
(obviously, I understand the reality, but most don't)
Where do I type that? By the way.. What is apt-get? What is nginx?
Why put the index.html in /var/www?
Why use nginx I've heard of apache why wouldn't I use that?
You haven't even detailed how to setup a linux that would use apt. And why not centos?
Where is the site going to be hosted, AWS/Digital Ocean/ Linode/ Heroku? How do they properly configure the machine to serve to internet?
How are my non-technical clients/employees/founders/etc. going to update it without bugging me all the time?
In other words my friend you've grossly over simplified the process of putting a website on the internet where other people can get to it and making it easily updatable by laymen
Instead the average person can be expected to google for something along the lines of "free website" or something similar, arrive at wordpress/blogger/tumblr/squarespace/flavour-of-month .com and just create an account.
I'd like to build just a website and have the rest set to an automatic that I really don't care about configuring.
...uhhh, not unless you work in a bloated enterprise shop. Most of the time, it's a one to three person show and one person CAN do it all (albeit maybe not everything equally perfect). I launch websites (whole platforms actually) - from server to web services to content - all the time, every few days. It is entirely possible and you get accustomed to it.
- Rails/Angular go a long way to speeding up development due to the number of 3rd party libraries available for them. Need User logins? Devise. Need queue processing? Sidekiq. AngularJS is going the same way as Rails for awesome 3rd party libraries.
- Bootstrap almost solves visual design for prototypes, and it's not hard to start customising the templates or even buying a 3rd party one off the shelf. It's not going to win any awards for graphic design but it's fine for 99% of people that will be using your site.
Case in point, I built http://www.knowyourgenre.com, as site for exploring music by genres, in around 3 months (with a lot of backtracking and taking bits out that I didn't wind up using).
1 person, I did the front end, back end and graphic design for it.
Not to say that grow is a bad idea, but I don't agree with the argument that 1 person can't build a site anymore, in fact I think it's getting easier.
For anyone at Grow that is reading this - I think you might find more people in agreement if you show them an apples to apples comparison. Show me all that it would take to launch comparable apps on GAE vs. Grow and let that speak for itself.
I suppose I must have glanced over this when I wrote the post, but I'm definitely targeting Grow towards producing content-heavy informational marketing web sites, blogs, portfolios, landing pages, personal sites, corporate information pages, marketing campaigns, etc.
In other words, Grow is great for teams that want to produce and manage stuff like the marketing content you see on https://stripe.com/, http://about.pinterest.com/, http://www.apple.com/mac/, http://www.google.com/think/, etc. I wouldn't recommend using Grow to build your actual product. :)
Often times, coordinating the launch of your marketing content with the launch of your product is tricky, and that's another thing I aim to solve.
Other than that I completely agree with you that it's easier now more than ever to get a site up and running. Design however takes more thought than throwing some existing bootstrap styles on there.
It is in fact trivial to build a web site, one person. My sister did it (not technical) went to WPEngine.com got the basic package, went to name.com and got a domain that wasn't taken yet, and added Google apps for the email component. Boom, "web site" and she is very non-technical, but she does know how to use a search engine.
Then there are the Geo/NeoCitites type things - also pretty trivial. And new entrant Ghost, also easy to do for one person.
Then there are the Github Pages, Dropbox pages, and Google Drive pages (and Google Sites for that matter, an unwanted love child with Jot).
If you are actually modestly technical then it gets even easier.
So that whole "its rocket science" meme doesn't really fly and that takes away from the whole 'this is hard we're here to help' theme.
I'm myself working for a French startup called Pikock[1] that is working hard on the next iteration of its drag-and-drop website builder. We're trying to make it as simple, efficient and streamlined as possible so that everyone gets a shot beyond the tech-savvy. Our core vision is that everyone, no matter the skill level is entitled to a presence online if they so choose.
Ultimately I want my 65-year old mom to be able to create content and share it with the world, even though there might not be an audience for her collection of hand-painted pebbles :)
I think there's a market for a service helping a team getting started on the right foot.
It could start with a popular stack of services and frameworks, let's say: - Github, Heroku, S3, node.js, angular, grunt, bower, yo, bootstrap, etc etc.
And just make it dead simple to have it configured and deployed.
Now, all these services are awesome by themselves, but they all require their own quirks and quacks to work together which makes it a real pain to get started.
Oh, and it should have a nice menu system for doing things related to the site when on a page.
Oh, and it should respond to the device and browser of the person using it, with the layout and functionality adjusting accordingly.
Oh, and the images should be the appropriate size for that device, because we don't want users on cellular networks to have to download large images.
Oh, and it should display for them in their preferred language. And without having to choose the language from a menu. Don't tell me about this internationali-whatsit and local-whoozits, I said it should display in their language! (God, you developers are annoying.)
Oh, and it should mirror the smoothness of the native applications of the user's device.
Oh, and it should be built on roughly the same technologies which websites have been using for the last 15 years. And I don't want to hear about "HTML is a system for describing documents, not applications" or "CSS is for styling documents, it's not a layout engine".
Yeah, you know, jeez, why is this so hard????? Everyone is stupid and in my way.
OMG. HOW THE HELL DO I BUILD A WEBSITE?
Nightmare. Hence why I rather build tool that runs over command line than building an actual website. It is damn hard.
This sounds like a friendlier Heroku and may well turn out to be brilliant, but it is still a lot more than just building a website.
My point here isn't that people should do exactly what I did. Rather, my point is that most of a web developer's job is finding the right components and then writing a little bit of code to glue them together. Stop looking for some special system that holds your hand like a toddler through every step of every process, and just write some damned code to do the thing you need done.
I personally don't believe in learning and deploying an entire framework to save less than 250 lines of code.
If you don't want to deal with the installation and configuration of the underlying software, don't lease a VPS or any other type of server ... lease a "service".
EDIT: I completely forgot about sites like Weebly. You don't even have any research to do with this type of solution as you just use what you're given.
Different strokes for different folks though. What someone needs to build a blog or portfolio is going to be different from what you need to build a startup.
Why? Rails is not any more scalable than Wordpress.
The modern way is much more efficient.
www.weebly.com