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For a small business that simply displays an informational site, but occasionally needs to add content, a post on a blog or a change in the text or similar, it

For a small business that simply displays an informational site, but occasionally needs to add content, a post on a blog or a change in the text or similar, it is sufficient to build a simple infrastructure of reading some markdown files and let them SFTP some markdown files and have periodic backups. One could also go as far as automatically committing those user uploaded files to a repo. None of which is difficult to do. It does get more complicated, if the small business wants users to be able to message them through the website, not just via e-mail. Or if the business suddenly wants to have a shop functionality on the site. Then CMSs start to slowly become an option. Many medium businesses don't even need that btw. In many instances marketing people just want to have control over websites, that they should not be given control over, since they usually are incapable of knowing the impact of what they are doing, when they add something like Google tagmanager to their site. They also tend to often break things, when using Wordpress, because they do not understand how it works under the hood, so that side of things is also not without hassle. And then the devs are called to fix what marketing broke. Even with Wordpress. At that point it would often be easier to let the devs build a non-Wordpress site, and any ideas about things that are not just content in markdown files need to be requests for the dev team to evaluate, and possibly work on, when deemed safe and lawful. Sadly the power dynamics in businesses are often stacked against conscientious developers.

imilk 1y ago
> let them SFTP some markdown files Have you ever worked with any SMBs before? This is at least 5 technical levels above their head. Would make as much sense as telling them, "just use this CLI tool". We're talking about people who will email you from their phone that the website is down, but it turns out it's just their home internet that is down. Or think that the website disappeared from the internet. When in reality it's now the #2 result in google and they never knew they you could type a URL directly into the browser.

imilk 1y ago

> let them SFTP some markdown files Have you ever worked with any SMBs before? This is at least 5 technical levels above their head. Would make as much sense as telling them, "just use this CLI tool". We're talking about people who will email you from their phone that the website is down, but it turns out it's just their home internet that is down. Or think that the website disappeared from the internet. When in reality it's now the #2 result in google and they never knew they you could type a URL directly into the browser.