6 ms·

The question should be "what". Static HTML will often fit the bill

kaishiro 10y ago
This is my everyday at the moment. WordPress's biggest success, in my opinion, is that it is synonymous with "website" for many incoming clients. I get "We need a WordPress site" far more often than "We need a website", and they're almost exclusively asking for the latter once we break down the business goals. Always feels like I'm starting from an entrenched position though.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
  Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.
  - kaishiro 10y ago
    Yeah, absolutely. To be clear, we haven't ditched the concept of a CMS altogether, we've simply shifted the paradigm to get the client's focus back on managing content instead of managing a site. Our current setup is using a static site generator (we're Rubyists on Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com/ https://middlemanapp.com/ - but take your pick here) to build the actual site. However, the content itself lives in a cloud-based CMS (we're on Contentful, but Prismic and Siteleaf are also good choices) - this is what the client has access to. During the build proc, the SSG polls the CMS and grabs all the latest content to package into the static site. On publish of any piece of content in the CMS, a webhook hits our build proc (either Codeship or Netlify) which in turns fires a rebuild of the site (which in turns pulls down the latest content). For us, the best part about the setup is that it's virtually impossible for the client to break the site. They could certainly make it look like hell - but they can't break it. On top of that, if they somehow, someway, manage to break the build by simply editing content, then the new site is simply never deployed. Let me know if you have any more questions - I love talking about this stuff.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
      Oh, that's a great solution! Webhooks are probably the missing link, since I've already looked at and used generators. I could even host a text editor on a server for them; there are enough decent HTML5 editors that the UX wouldn't be an issue. Thanks!

This is my everyday at the moment. WordPress's biggest success, in my opinion, is that it is synonymous with "website" for many incoming clients. I get "We need a WordPress site" far more often than "We need a website", and they're almost exclusively asking for the latter once we break down the business goals. Always feels like I'm starting from an entrenched position though.

yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.
- kaishiro 10y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. To be clear, we haven't ditched the concept of a CMS altogether, we've simply shifted the paradigm to get the client's focus back on managing content instead of managing a site. Our current setup is using a static site generator (we're Rubyists on Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com/ https://middlemanapp.com/ - but take your pick here) to build the actual site. However, the content itself lives in a cloud-based CMS (we're on Contentful, but Prismic and Siteleaf are also good choices) - this is what the client has access to. During the build proc, the SSG polls the CMS and grabs all the latest content to package into the static site. On publish of any piece of content in the CMS, a webhook hits our build proc (either Codeship or Netlify) which in turns fires a rebuild of the site (which in turns pulls down the latest content). For us, the best part about the setup is that it's virtually impossible for the client to break the site. They could certainly make it look like hell - but they can't break it. On top of that, if they somehow, someway, manage to break the build by simply editing content, then the new site is simply never deployed. Let me know if you have any more questions - I love talking about this stuff.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    Oh, that's a great solution! Webhooks are probably the missing link, since I've already looked at and used generators. I could even host a text editor on a server for them; there are enough decent HTML5 editors that the UX wouldn't be an issue. Thanks!