PinkPigeon

I really like the advice in this.

At the same time, I often find it dispiriting to hear "it takes x amount of time", be that 10 years, 10,000 hours or a lifetime.

While I understand that it is important to have these metrics precisely to dispel the idea that anyone can learn c++ in any meaningful way in 24h, at the same time I find it harder to start something when I am constantly reminded of the fact that nothing I produce will be worth anything compared to those with a giant head start (yes, yes, never compare yourself to others, just to yourself from x time ago).

The 10 year thing means I can meaningfully learn, what, 70 thing in life if I am not spending the vast majority of my time at a full time job? So, that makes it 3-4 things?

How depressing.

Admittedly, I feel I have almost never studied deliberately. I happen to have learned about 3 things to reasonable expertise in my 30 ish years. All three just happened. It was effortless to learn, as it was interesting to learn.

I simply cannot imagine what it would mean to have to dedicate 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to something I am not interested in. In my own experience I would go so far as to say that I either love something enough to want to do it 8h a day, or not at all.

I wonder if I'll ever find a 4th thing, later in life. I really want to learn more things, but the rule of x hours is discouraging to think about when I have 30 something years less left on this planet than when I started.

Ah, two of these did get to me:

- Pricing, I can never tell whether I'm pricing too low or too high. So I went as low as I could feasibly go, to make sure that price was eliminated as a factor turning clients away.

- Don't change your mind every 5min...haha, yes, it's quite easy to start to doubt what you are doing and change strategies without having fully explored your original approach.

Thanks for the reminder.

Hey, thanks for the response.

> You identified you're niche wrong, i think. Your description is literally targeted for developers and your landing page too.

That's a good point. Being a dev myself, I probably projected what I'd care about a bit too much.

> Local businesses that already have a website, don't need another one.

This is an interesting one. When I initially started researching businesses, I found about 1,000 of them, with terrible Wordpress sites. I'd say about 100 of them have updated their sites ever since. Which means some businesses do indeed look for, find and then go with a company to update their site.

> Agencies use their own tools for site creation and are hard to convince.

Yup, not going after them.

My target market is (was supposed to be) small businesses with terrible Wordpress sites, or no websites at all.

I may rethink the positioning a bit though, as these comments have been very helpful in elucidating some issues with it.

Thank you very much :)

> Your effort here is admirable, but I think you have chosen a very hard market to make an impact in.

Yup, I like to think I was always quite realistic about the chances of succeeding in this market (mind you, my definition of success is reaching a few hundred customers, not millions, haha). Wordpress and Squarespace are incredibly entrenched and their marketing makes it seem like there are no alternatives, but there are. Discoverability is the main issue.

> Who is your target customer? A small business owner without a website? In which case listing features like "Cloudfare CDN" and "DDoS protection" won't resonate with them at all.

This is a very good point and I have struggled with this. If you were a dev who wanted to re-sell and make websites for others with my system, you could. If you were a business and wanted me to build your site, well, I offer that as well. If you wanted to do it yourself, business or not, then you could, too. The problem is, I don't know which of these routes could work. So I don't want to commit to either of these branches. At the same time, offering them all waters down the proposition.

> * 10,000 for submissions a month is pretty meaningless: if 10,000 people a month are interested in my business I am motivated to spend a lot more than £7.99 to capture and process them. Either make the limits really small to feel like a limit, or just say unlimited.

Good point, I think I might make them unlimited.

> * support responses in 5 days ... this would be a red flag regardless of price. As a small startup the one thing you can offer is exceptional support (since you don't have many customers to offer it too!). If it takes off lower the expectations, but I'd suggest 1 day even for the lowest plan should be doable (and if not raise the price...)

Another very good point. I think I wanted to play it safe here. Is it better to commit to a turnaround time at all? Or is it easier to just say 'exceptional support', which I am indeed aiming to provide (and I think there aren't many situations where it would take me 5 days to respond. It's much more likely to be same-day), or is that too vague?

> A business owner doesn't really want a website builder at all, they want a website: lead more with your 'custom websites' page. If £199 is too much of a hurdle for them then realistically they aren't going to be a great customer anyway. Maybe offer a couple of business a free website to have some real world referable examples.

I have done that actually. Still no responses. I have a feeling that email marketing is not the way to go these days.

> If you are targeting website designers (which are probably an easier to identify market) then focus more on the builder itself, maybe stressing the mobile friendly side (though I don't really see how that helps me if I am a designer ... I won't try and work from my phone).

The mobile angle came from the fact that a fair number of business owners (n=10) have told me that, if they were to update their website at all, they would be doing it after work hours, which is when they are on the sofa with their phone or tablet. They don't want to sit at the computer / desk after already doing that all day in the office. So, making the whole thing work on mobile seemed like a useful differentiator over Wordpress or Squarespace, as they certainly don't work on phones (tablets are better).

Thanks for all this advice, it really helps to get outside perspectives on this stuff. I can see that positioning is my biggest challenge for now.

That would have been my first question as well.

It can work, if you specifically add the hash of that bit of JS to script-src or use the nonce based approach (I never figured that one out).

Otherwise it's unsafe-inline, at which point you may aswell not bother ;)

If it makes you feel any better, I must disagree with brundolf here and confirm that figuring out "which of these 1,500 DOM elements is the reason that between 321 to 334px width one of my container divs simply refuses to stay within screen boundaries" can be absolutely maddening and I have no idea how one would ease that process.

Element sizing in CSS is anything but straight forward, especially as there are loads of non obvious rules applied to elements like text inputs etc

But maybe I am just not as good at CSS as I thought :)

I think there is a lot of undiscovered country left when it comes to website builders.

The incumbents like WordPress and Squarespace probably want you to think that the market is saturated and the problem has been solved, but that couldn't be further from the truth. They just have huge marketing budgets.

Truly simple, easy to use website builders barely exist.

Here on HN most people would consider Squarespace laughably easy to use, but that is simply not the case for true tech novices.

Bringing websites to an audience of real tech illiterates is a real challenge that hasn't been solved yet.

One of the, if not the most difficult part of doing this, however, is convincing the world that easIER website builders are possible, when there are businesses with hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing budgets pretending that their solutions are the easiest ever, making anyone tech illiterate immediately suspicious of those claims. So you have to find other ways of marketing yourself.

I'm trying to do that very thing at the moment and it's as interesting as it is difficult.

Funnily enough, I guess I use my own website builder to do this.

I've battled many different rich text editor implementations and have found quill to be the most reliable so far. No issues on Android whatsoever. Fingers crossed it stays that way!

Thanks for the input! We do actually offer that as well. And at pretty darn competitive rates (because we can build sites very quickly), but have not had any interest from that angle yet either. Yes, we've contacted businesses which have terrible / no websites. But it's surprisingly tricky getting people out of the mindset of "I hate my current website setup, so all website setups must be terrible"

Hey thanks so much for the input. Yes, you have hit upon many points I am aware of. I knew what I was getting myself into when making yet another website builder. Thankfully I can run the thing almost for free, which allows me to play the long game, if I want to, anyway. We differentiate on a few different metrics. It's certainly a much easier to use product than other website builders out there. I think our module-based approach is reasonably unique too. So is the quality of our documentation.

The thing is, and that was one of your central points, website builders are not compared side by side. I am thinking of making some content that does this, which may also help.

I'll give you a shout via email to talk more in depth.

I don't have one yet. Still working that out!

I am certainly monitoring this thread with a lot of interest.

My approaches and results so far:

- Email marketing. This was done by identifying businesses in the local area (roughly 1,000 of them) and just churning through contacting them, ideally with the name of the owner sourced from their website. Result: literally not a single response or conversion.

- Posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with tutorials, news, offers about my product every 3 days. Result: also zero. I should note that I have never had a social account before this, so I have no existing networks of friends and family to rely on.

- Talking about my product on Hackernews. Result: hundreds of page views and 4 free trial signups. Nice! Finally something.

- Reddit posts: tens of page views, no signups, so far as I can tell.

I have a few more routes, like paid for advertising, but I am honestly trying to do this all at a cost as close to 0 as possible (FWIW, I'm paying about £10 a month for my VPS and Cloudflare workers, that's it)

The product is a static website builder that's supposed to be much easier to use than WordPress, mostly cheaper and also super usable on mobile (which is rare I believe).

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk if you're curious, and apologies for the self promotion.

While this is definitely a high-effort post, with a lot of useful information, it's sort of missing a huge change that's about to happen with JSON in Postgres 14:

  SELECT *
  FROM shirts 
  WHERE details['attributes']['color'] = '"neon yellow"'
    AND details['attributes']['size'] = '"medium"'

Which is in fact making me wonder whether I should change my entire system from file-based JSON to DB-based JSON, which would no-doubt speed everything up by orders of magnitude.

More info: https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/better-json-in-postgres-wi...

Hey, thanks for the response.

It's a website builder for (very) tech-phobic people. I mean people who consider both Wordpress and Squarespace too complicated.

It generates static sites which are then hosted on Cloudflare.

It doesn't do shops or giant blogs, but websites up to 10 pages are very quick and easy to create, without being restricted by themes. So instead of a theme-based or drag&drop block-style editor, our sites are assembled from pre-defined modules.

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk for some more info.

I've hesitantly talked about it on /r/webdev so far.

Yup, the whole thing is aimed at people who have big, complicated Wordpress setups for their business-onepagers that never get updated, because whoever built it isn't around anymore and it's just too complicated to use.

I built it because that's what I wanted: I didn't want to think about how to build a website or how to host it. I wanted quick, visual feedback, the ability to share the feedback and the ability to do it all on mobile.

Hence, this product :)

I make a website builder and it is a constant battle to try to keep websites to a certain size.

Imagery and video are the biggest enemies. Partly because users don't know the filesizes of their imagery (so we either recompress / resample and then image quality suffers, or we leave imagery untouched and then you have a bloated website).

Then if you start embedding 3rd party things like video players, size just explodes. I've noticed, much to my chagrin, that my own homepage (https://pinkpigeon.co.uk) does 8mb in transfers, which on my 10mbit connection is not exactly snappy.

The irony is, that in terms of pure JS and CSS our sites are comparitively light (Wordpress and Squarespace sites are often much heavier on those two metrics).

But, people want rich content. They want imagery and videos. I have considered using WebP, just to find out that Safari doesn't support it. So I'm back to JPEG until Apple leaves the dark ages, or we can all agree on an image format like AVIF etc.

For quickly putting together a modular website, you could also try something I've built: https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

No-code and based on a range of modules that allow for arranging content in a variety of ways rapidly. You can then launch that to Cloudflare as well, if desired.

Admittedly, we probably offer less finely detailed control over the layout, but at the gain of speed when prototyping.

Very interesting post. How did you deal with the fact that almost all subreddits have a pretty strict self-promotion policy?

I am always hesitant to post about my product on any subreddit, because as soon as I read the sidebar rules, one of the first things they say is to not do any self-promotion.

How did you get around that?

Are you the maintainer? In any case, I'd like to say I really like your landing page, straight forward, excellent layout, delightful imagery :)

I've always gone with the option to 'show password' and like you say, the 'forgot password' button sorts you out if there's an issue :)

Yup, Twitter: https://twitter.com/PinkPigeonDigi

Or, if you send me a message via the contact form and tick 'submit', you can sign up to our newsletter at the same time.

I'll split that out into a separate newsletter signup in the next few days.

Thanks so much for the kind words, much appreciated!

I think WordPress is a fantastic piece of technology / achievement. Just like Windows is as well. And just like with Windows, as you say, the experience of the person setting up the system is what matters. So, of course there are some super easy to use, yet flexible, excellent and satisfying WordPress setups out there. And, for complicated, large sites, there is probably hardly anything that beats a good WordPress setup.

But, then I look at my neighborhood and the 1,000 small-business WordPress sites, with blogs that have been abandoned in 2015, should be one-pagers and not seen an update since because their owners don't understand WordPress and also can't afford to pay someone for every small change and now they think the whole Internet is like that (40% as you say), and changing that is going to be one hell of an uphill battle.

I don't have to hate WordPress or knock their efforts to see ways to improve things with more modern approaches.

Hey, thank you, you have just corrected a massive misconception I had about SSD performance.

My logic always worked like this: if IOPS is input / output per second, surely that means 10,000 IOPS of, say, the usual random 4kb file write at QD1, then that means I can get 10,000 of those in one second. So, a higher number must be better.

I had no idea that IOPS needs to take latency into account. After having done some reading I am still somewhat confused as to how this really works, but for future reference I will use latency as a measurement of performance again, as that is indeed what I thought IOPS was.

I went the static site via Hugo -> cloudflare workers sites route. It is so vastly superior to fiddling with hosting a SQL database, plugins, constant updates, etc.

I built an entire frontend around it (my username .co.uk) which tries to reshape how tech novices work with websites.

I have found small business owners I talked to (n=10) to be allergic to dealing with their WordPress or squarespace sites, because despite everything, they are just not simple to use. They just try to cater to too many use cases. Being everything to everyone comes with complexity that's very difficult to navigate as a tech-novice. Though I think squarespace do a better job than WordPress. Albeit more expensive.

The funny thing is, people have grown such an aversion to dealing with websites that I am also having quite a hard time trying to get anyone to look at it. As soon as they do though, it's like a lightbulb moment for them, to see how simple it can really be.

Naturally the trade off is flexibility, but I haven't had any complaints about that yet. I am not dealing with very complex sites though (and wouldn't want to either).

It's so interesting to see just how successful WordPress is. Among developers especially. I look at small business websites all around where I live and it's all WordPress and every single one was made by yet another wordpress-shop that does nothing but setup WordPress for people. It's a huge ecosystem.

And you know what I have learned by talking to these businesses? It's that WordPress is still not easy enough to use for non techy people.

Nobody wants to touch their website, out of fear of doing something wrong. So they have to go pay someone to do it every time.

I'm running pinkpigeon.co.uk, which tries to actually make websites easy enough to use for everyone. But I am actually running into a problem where people expect all websites to be like WordPress and the first thing you hear is "oh I don't want to learn another thing". It's only when I show them the system, that they go "oh wow, that really is a lot easier". The problem is trying to convince anyone of this remotely via the Internet. Much easier to do in person.

I have the utmost respect for WordPress and used it much myself, but at the moment it's challenging to have to be compared against it when simpler solutions exist.

Cool, thanks. Looks quite interesting.

Hey, thanks for the response. Makes more sense to me now.

I mean, I love the insane GB/sec figures, but does anyone else mostly care about IOPS? These state 1.8M read and 1M write, which sounds quite impressive.

Does this play nice with a Content Security Policy which forbids inline-scripts / styles?

This is an incredibly useful resource, thank you!

A few notes:

- The amount of space you get from these hosters is just staggering. I'd be interested to know how many Wordpress sites out there even reach a gigabyte's worth of assets

- People pay $25 a month to host WP sites???

- wp-login is a slow process for some reason, would love to know why

- Evidently, hosting WP sites is complex enough for there to be a rich ecosystem of managed WP-hosting-services

- Nobody bothers implementing CSP properly (that's usually how you tank Mozilla Observatory scores that badly)

It seems to me that there is a giant market there, just waiting to be snapped up by whomever figures out how to get people bought into the static-everything ecosystem, where things run both faster and cheaper.