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I read parent’s post as an argument for simple sites where nothing more is needed. If your goal is to convey information in an acceptable format, _and you want

I read parent’s post as an argument for simple sites where nothing more is needed. If your goal is to convey information in an acceptable format, _and you want to manage it yourself_, it can be hand written pretty straightforward in a notepad, in single html page with a bootstrap include. If your dry cleaning business needs a page with the opening hours, it’s not more complicate than managing your expanses in Excel. Except for the hosting, which is another story altogether. To your point, this is also where the value of Squarespace like solutions lies, for people who still want/need to touch their site but win’t go the length to understand how it works. Now, > people who might want to concentrate on running their dry cleaning business or dental practice Do these people even want to deal with a website themselves, and not straight ask someone to build and maintain it for them ? The same way that cleaning business wouldn’t spend their days in Illustrator designing new business cards or posters, they’d ask someone else to do it.

DrewADesign 4y ago
I’ll bet you somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% off small business owners used a professional-grade Adobe layout product to design their business cards but most have business cards that look approximately they way they want. They probably put them together with a neat WYSIWYG interface with heavy-handed guides that let them go from idea to ordering in a half hour max. Do you think they’d have done that if their choice was to create them with HTML and CSS? The underlying HTML for their website might be as simple as a very complex excel document if they want to look like they’re from 1994… but a) that’s probably worse than having no webpage at all from a branding perspective, and b) unlike excel, HTML isn’t modeled after their common existing business practices, is a single-purpose tool for them and involves a bunch of other knowledge to make that html useful, like CSS, hosting, accessibility, etc. If the technology exists to let them intuitively form a webpage like they’re working with clay then why not let them? If it’s easy enough, then why wouldn’t they want to form their own? If nobody wanted to do this sort of thing on their own, Squarespace and Wix wouldn’t exist.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I feel we're discussing a difference in terminology, where to me business card creation sites and Squarespace/Wix are not tools but services. Case in point, you probably have to order your business card from the site you built it, and you continue paying a monthly/annual fee to Squarespace/Wix once your site is up. Both tools and services should exist, and there should be something available at every price point. The point I think was just that there are simple ways to build a site if your needs are simple and you're OK with learning how to do it. If you're not there are myriads of other solutions to tend to your needs.
  - DrewADesign 4y ago
    The distinction between software and service is irrelevant to this conversation. In this context, a webpage and a business card are functionally the same thing— static advertisement and identification. If nontechnical users have software to create an abstraction which gets written into a machine-readable format, whether than gets sent directly to a web host or business card printer doesn't matter. I mean hell— most modern professional software development toolchains are at least partly service-based already.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      > The distinction between software and service I kinda disagree. You are responsible for the first, while the provider is responsible for the second. For instance when we pay for gitlab or Adobe CS, if it's down it's on us to workaround or plan for the situation and deliver the final product to our clients according to plan. When we pay for Squarespace, it's on them to deliver the final product to our customers, the puck ends there and if it dies there will be little we can do to help, short of switching DNS to a backup site.
      - DrewADesign 4y ago
        Ok— Figma is a browser-based SaaS design and vector graphics creation tool— a large chunk of commercially-used vector graphics are made using Figma right now. Figma isn't a service because the end-user doesn't touch it? Where you're drawing the line between a service and tool is an artifact of your perspective. Whether someone further along in the cycle must push a button to trigger some part of that process or if the code is executed on your local machine, a docker instance on your machine, a docker instance on a server, or wherever else is an implementation detail.

DrewADesign 4y ago

I’ll bet you somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% off small business owners used a professional-grade Adobe layout product to design their business cards but most have business cards that look approximately they way they want. They probably put them together with a neat WYSIWYG interface with heavy-handed guides that let them go from idea to ordering in a half hour max. Do you think they’d have done that if their choice was to create them with HTML and CSS? The underlying HTML for their website might be as simple as a very complex excel document if they want to look like they’re from 1994… but a) that’s probably worse than having no webpage at all from a branding perspective, and b) unlike excel, HTML isn’t modeled after their common existing business practices, is a single-purpose tool for them and involves a bunch of other knowledge to make that html useful, like CSS, hosting, accessibility, etc. If the technology exists to let them intuitively form a webpage like they’re working with clay then why not let them? If it’s easy enough, then why wouldn’t they want to form their own? If nobody wanted to do this sort of thing on their own, Squarespace and Wix wouldn’t exist.

makeitdouble 4y ago
I feel we're discussing a difference in terminology, where to me business card creation sites and Squarespace/Wix are not tools but services. Case in point, you probably have to order your business card from the site you built it, and you continue paying a monthly/annual fee to Squarespace/Wix once your site is up. Both tools and services should exist, and there should be something available at every price point. The point I think was just that there are simple ways to build a site if your needs are simple and you're OK with learning how to do it. If you're not there are myriads of other solutions to tend to your needs.
- DrewADesign 4y ago
  The distinction between software and service is irrelevant to this conversation. In this context, a webpage and a business card are functionally the same thing— static advertisement and identification. If nontechnical users have software to create an abstraction which gets written into a machine-readable format, whether than gets sent directly to a web host or business card printer doesn't matter. I mean hell— most modern professional software development toolchains are at least partly service-based already.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    > The distinction between software and service I kinda disagree. You are responsible for the first, while the provider is responsible for the second. For instance when we pay for gitlab or Adobe CS, if it's down it's on us to workaround or plan for the situation and deliver the final product to our clients according to plan. When we pay for Squarespace, it's on them to deliver the final product to our customers, the puck ends there and if it dies there will be little we can do to help, short of switching DNS to a backup site.
    - DrewADesign 4y ago
      Ok— Figma is a browser-based SaaS design and vector graphics creation tool— a large chunk of commercially-used vector graphics are made using Figma right now. Figma isn't a service because the end-user doesn't touch it? Where you're drawing the line between a service and tool is an artifact of your perspective. Whether someone further along in the cycle must push a button to trigger some part of that process or if the code is executed on your local machine, a docker instance on your machine, a docker instance on a server, or wherever else is an implementation detail.