6 ms·

I love static websites. Most of our YC websites are static (www, startupschool, femalefounders, fellowship, etc.) Problem is I'm not sure we've really seem any

by kevin 11y ago

I love static websites. Most of our YC websites are static (www, startupschool, femalefounders, fellowship, etc.) Problem is I'm not sure we've really seem any great innovation here in regards to nontechnical adoption since MovableType. I know we have Jekyll and Middleman and those are fantastic pieces of software for developers (we use Middleman here at YC), but they're missing a UI bridge to get people to the promise land. Your current implementation...I'm not so sure it can reach nontechnical people yet. I think it sits at this middle point that makes it easy for technical people to hand off content management to nontechnical people. That's probably a good / smart way to start...but it will limit your potential audience. Looking at the site, I don't think targeting a technology is the best approach. People aren't going to be Googling "alternatives to cpanel" to try and find you. You should be targeting people / use cases. Designers, creative agencies, IT people dealing with the marketing team, etc. The zip a folder and upload is a great interface (A+ on giving me a sample project to try), but what I'm most interested in is how the CMS / form stuff is going to work. Unfortunately, it wasn't ready yet. I will say that adding classname is a good start, but remember try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code. Find some way to allow people to click to specify what'll be dynamic. It could use the same mechanism, just make adding the classname a thing that's done with a click and not a cursor. The CMS / Form stuff is what's really going to sell this into organizations. Then you're going after a very large space. I think something like 45% of the Internet is powered by a CMS. 25% of that by Wordpress, something initially made for some other task. If someone gets it right, there's a lot of money to be made. Thanks for sharing and I'll be on the look out for your fellowship application!

sgallant 11y ago
Cool. Building a UI for Jekyll is exactly what we're setting out to do. Great idea about the click-to-specify what's dynamic! Agreed that focusing on technical people is a smaller market; that's just phase 1 for us. Thanks a bunch!
bobfunk 11y ago
Founder of netlify and BitBalloon here. We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wordpress. Our alpha users love it and this is an open source project. We've been working in this space for quite a while, and are extremely excited about the potential for static web-tech. We started out with simple drag and drop deploys at BitBalloon (you don't even need to zip your site first, just drag a folder unto BitBalloon.com). Later we launched our premium solution called netlify that's by far the most feature rich on the market (continuous deployment, form processing, API proxying, redirects, rewrite rules, SSL, etc, etc) and offers the best performance you'll get today. It's spot on that the really big deal will be solving the CMS need, without making developers give up on all the advantages of static site generators. Some of our larger clients are using netlify + roots/middleman/metalsmith/etc + Contentful/Prismic/etc to build large CMS drives sites that are built up front and hosted directly on our CDN, but this is still a bit too advances a setup for the millions and millions of normal CMS driven sites out there. Our solution is building a completely open-source CMS that works with all common static site generators. It's in private beta right now, but getting real close to opening up the repo to the public. It’s completely free of any lock-in, and you can take it and host it anywhere with ease. Happy to send an invite to anyone here. Just ping me at matt@netlify.com Some feedback to the product of this thread: Love the initiative. Drag and drop uploads are nice, but unless you handle CDN configuration and cache invalidation, it doesn't seem like a big step up from just FTPing files to an S3 bucket. Otherwise you might risk mainly appealing to beginners or people looking for a cheap way to publish a personal website, and those can't pay much. With a monthly price of $1/site, the life-time value of a client will be very low, so you will barely be able to spend anything on customer acquisition. One.com, GoDaddy or S3 can offer extremely low prices because they have huge scale, but as a tiny startup, you have no way of reaching the amount of users you would need to get on board with a model like that. Especially since this is way more technical than Wix/Weebly/SquareSpace,etc, while not really offering real value to professional developers or agencies. If you want to build in the static hosting space, you should start by figuring out if there's something you could offer beyond what the existing players like netlify, BitBalloon, CloudCannon, Divshot, etc, already have, and make sure you're not just trying to compete on price. My 5 cents written in 5 minutes :) Good Luck!
- jpatters 11y ago
  The CMS you mentioned sounds pretty cool. I tried to email you to request an invite but it bounced. Is that the correct email address?
  - bobfunk 11y ago
    That's strange! Just tried to send myself a few test mails to that mail, and it works fine here... You can try our general mail, info@netlify.com
bosdev 11y ago
> try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code You might want to take a look at Eager (https://eager.io https://eager.io)

by kevin 11y ago

sgallant 11y ago

Cool. Building a UI for Jekyll is exactly what we're setting out to do. Great idea about the click-to-specify what's dynamic! Agreed that focusing on technical people is a smaller market; that's just phase 1 for us. Thanks a bunch!

bobfunk 11y ago

Founder of netlify and BitBalloon here. We are working on an editing interface for static websites that can compete with the ease of use and flexibility of wordpress. Our alpha users love it and this is an open source project. We've been working in this space for quite a while, and are extremely excited about the potential for static web-tech. We started out with simple drag and drop deploys at BitBalloon (you don't even need to zip your site first, just drag a folder unto BitBalloon.com). Later we launched our premium solution called netlify that's by far the most feature rich on the market (continuous deployment, form processing, API proxying, redirects, rewrite rules, SSL, etc, etc) and offers the best performance you'll get today. It's spot on that the really big deal will be solving the CMS need, without making developers give up on all the advantages of static site generators. Some of our larger clients are using netlify + roots/middleman/metalsmith/etc + Contentful/Prismic/etc to build large CMS drives sites that are built up front and hosted directly on our CDN, but this is still a bit too advances a setup for the millions and millions of normal CMS driven sites out there. Our solution is building a completely open-source CMS that works with all common static site generators. It's in private beta right now, but getting real close to opening up the repo to the public. It’s completely free of any lock-in, and you can take it and host it anywhere with ease. Happy to send an invite to anyone here. Just ping me at matt@netlify.com Some feedback to the product of this thread: Love the initiative. Drag and drop uploads are nice, but unless you handle CDN configuration and cache invalidation, it doesn't seem like a big step up from just FTPing files to an S3 bucket. Otherwise you might risk mainly appealing to beginners or people looking for a cheap way to publish a personal website, and those can't pay much. With a monthly price of $1/site, the life-time value of a client will be very low, so you will barely be able to spend anything on customer acquisition. One.com, GoDaddy or S3 can offer extremely low prices because they have huge scale, but as a tiny startup, you have no way of reaching the amount of users you would need to get on board with a model like that. Especially since this is way more technical than Wix/Weebly/SquareSpace,etc, while not really offering real value to professional developers or agencies. If you want to build in the static hosting space, you should start by figuring out if there's something you could offer beyond what the existing players like netlify, BitBalloon, CloudCannon, Divshot, etc, already have, and make sure you're not just trying to compete on price. My 5 cents written in 5 minutes :) Good Luck!

jpatters 11y ago
The CMS you mentioned sounds pretty cool. I tried to email you to request an invite but it bounced. Is that the correct email address?
- bobfunk 11y ago
  That's strange! Just tried to send myself a few test mails to that mail, and it works fine here... You can try our general mail, info@netlify.com

bosdev 11y ago

> try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code You might want to take a look at Eager (https://eager.io https://eager.io)