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I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a r

I hope more people stop building bespoke websites and start building tools for regular people to just make things. It's 2021. It should not be this hard for a regular person to update a website. If you can make a powerpoint presentation with MS PowerPoint, why can't you make a website that way?

thombles 5y ago
It's funny you invoke PowerPoint - MS FrontPage was exactly this tool and it worked reasonably well, as did iWeb. Publishing WYSIWYG websites from the desktop was given up in the 00s, and now we have Squarespace and Facebook Pages.
- senko 5y ago
  I was there. It was horrible. FrontPage output was an unholy mess and god help you if you ever needed to dive in that codebase by hand. Current solutions are far from perfect but I never want to go back to that.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?
    - senko 5y ago
      No. Do you ever publish your web content as PPT? Written a web app using PPTX?
      - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
        No, but my point is, why don't we? I mean, we've gone to the moon, we're going to Mars, we can now delicately land a rocket on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean, and we can turn vaccines around in a year. Maybe we can make websites as easy as powerpoint? If we can't make it work with HTML and CSS, maybe they need to go?
        senko 5y ago
        There are much better ways of doing that than what FP did. There are many great website builder tools that produce decent output. I'm not saying we have to write all of it manually, but if you want to easily integrate it with other systems (php scripts,, templating engines, ...) it needs to be human readable. Dreamweaver, contemporary with FrontPage, took a better approach and was loved by many designers much longer (tho by now everyone probably uses Sketch and Figma).
- zrobotics 5y ago
  It's really quite a shame we don't have current equivalents of FrontPage and VisualBasic. Sure, the code they generated wasn't clean at all, but those tools allowed average users to create some fairly sophisticated sites and tools. I remember a friend in college just randomly asked me to look over the site she had made for the nonprofit she volunteered at. She had never expressed even the slightest interest in programming, and frankly was your average windows user in 2007; really only familiar with office. Sure, the actual Html was atrocious, and changing anything directly in the code was nigh-impossible, but the site itself actually looked pretty good. I really only needed to help with getting it setup on hosting, since it was mostly a static site the FrontPage output was completely fine. This nonprofit didn't have the money to hire me, since that type of webdev was fairly lucrative, but since it only took a few hours of my time I just comped the work. I don't know of a modern equivalent aside from something like squarespace, which has a monthly fee that small orgs might find prohibitive.
  - porker 5y ago
    Dreamweaver still exists and does a good job. It requires you to have the expensive Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it's still cheaper for organisations who have someone to do the site to go that route than set up and maintain WordPress.
lostfocus 5y ago
I hate to tell you but its 2022.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Well, that was the original WP. Lean, and the theme handled the presentation. But as the article points out, that's fading away. Sure page builders reduce the need for a FE dev, but then the user needs to understand CSS. Is that a win? Pay someone else $100? Or spend half a day trying to figure out CSS? I see basic questions in (FB) WP groups all the time. And what about UX basics? All that said, and to your point, from a web vistor pov, most sites are too bloated, too complex, etc. And all that visual shite on your small screen? Who wants that??
Gigachad 5y ago
You can. Squarespace / wix / etc have filled this role.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  They don't. not only are the users not having ownership of their content and distribution, there is also censorship

thombles 5y ago

It's funny you invoke PowerPoint - MS FrontPage was exactly this tool and it worked reasonably well, as did iWeb. Publishing WYSIWYG websites from the desktop was given up in the 00s, and now we have Squarespace and Facebook Pages.

senko 5y ago
I was there. It was horrible. FrontPage output was an unholy mess and god help you if you ever needed to dive in that codebase by hand. Current solutions are far from perfect but I never want to go back to that.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Do you ever dive into a PowerPoint file by hand?
  - senko 5y ago
    No. Do you ever publish your web content as PPT? Written a web app using PPTX?
    - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
      No, but my point is, why don't we? I mean, we've gone to the moon, we're going to Mars, we can now delicately land a rocket on a platform floating in the middle of the ocean, and we can turn vaccines around in a year. Maybe we can make websites as easy as powerpoint? If we can't make it work with HTML and CSS, maybe they need to go?
      - senko 5y ago
        There are much better ways of doing that than what FP did. There are many great website builder tools that produce decent output. I'm not saying we have to write all of it manually, but if you want to easily integrate it with other systems (php scripts,, templating engines, ...) it needs to be human readable. Dreamweaver, contemporary with FrontPage, took a better approach and was loved by many designers much longer (tho by now everyone probably uses Sketch and Figma).
zrobotics 5y ago
It's really quite a shame we don't have current equivalents of FrontPage and VisualBasic. Sure, the code they generated wasn't clean at all, but those tools allowed average users to create some fairly sophisticated sites and tools. I remember a friend in college just randomly asked me to look over the site she had made for the nonprofit she volunteered at. She had never expressed even the slightest interest in programming, and frankly was your average windows user in 2007; really only familiar with office. Sure, the actual Html was atrocious, and changing anything directly in the code was nigh-impossible, but the site itself actually looked pretty good. I really only needed to help with getting it setup on hosting, since it was mostly a static site the FrontPage output was completely fine. This nonprofit didn't have the money to hire me, since that type of webdev was fairly lucrative, but since it only took a few hours of my time I just comped the work. I don't know of a modern equivalent aside from something like squarespace, which has a monthly fee that small orgs might find prohibitive.
- porker 5y ago
  Dreamweaver still exists and does a good job. It requires you to have the expensive Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it's still cheaper for organisations who have someone to do the site to go that route than set up and maintain WordPress.

lostfocus 5y ago

I hate to tell you but its 2022.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Well, that was the original WP. Lean, and the theme handled the presentation. But as the article points out, that's fading away. Sure page builders reduce the need for a FE dev, but then the user needs to understand CSS. Is that a win? Pay someone else $100? Or spend half a day trying to figure out CSS? I see basic questions in (FB) WP groups all the time. And what about UX basics? All that said, and to your point, from a web vistor pov, most sites are too bloated, too complex, etc. And all that visual shite on your small screen? Who wants that??

Gigachad 5y ago

You can. Squarespace / wix / etc have filled this role.

cblconfederate 5y ago
They don't. not only are the users not having ownership of their content and distribution, there is also censorship