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Comment by jeromenerf | Hacker News Reader

Item #3 would be the most difficult task of the lot for "non techies" in my experience: FTP client, web hosting setup, ...

I taught a class (10 people, master's degree, journalists) about web and publishing, with no prior experience. We used gitlab pages and hugo, with the intent of getting some hands on experience with web tech and owning an actual project and website.

Markdown writing and HTML/CSS hacking went smoothly but most of all, students were impressed by the experience of getting a website online, with their content, in a matter of minutes, all in the browser.

In comparison, registering for some HTTP/FTP plan somewhere and using a FTP client can be quite daunting.

There are some "dropbox based" website generator services that could make the publishing workflow even easier.

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Ok so we've identified where the friction is - how can we improve on that for the lay person?

How about https://www.netlify.com? Recently had to teach a non-tech person how to host a website from scratch. With all the non-trivial requirements (dns, vps, web server), I thought it would be easiest to just use netlify. That way, a git push on the repo will deploy the site immediately.

"A push on the git repo" is not something I would think trivial for a non-tech person. However, netlify also supports just drag-and-dropping a zip onto the dashboard. That's probably as easy as it gets.

Yep, I had to explain the concept of version control system, using the old my_doc_file.docx, my_doc_file_final.docx, my_doc_file_final_final.docx, ...

I just told him when to use the commands git init, remote, add, commit, and push and what the workflow looks like.

As a couple of people have mentioned, there is a drag and drop feature. How did I miss this!? Anyway it would have saved a couple of minutes of explanation.

But then you need to create that zip file with the appropriate folder and file structure. I fear that would be too much to ask for then non-technical person that struggles with doing git commit.

You actually don't even have to zip it up. It just needs to be a folder with an index.html file in it. If Microsoft Word exports that, your non–technical person should be fine.

You don't need git... they have also a drag-and-drop option - just drag a local directory with your HTML files into the Netlify page and you're done.

I don't know how I missed this. To be fair the "New site from git" button looks bright and green, while the "drag and drop your site folder here" looks dull and grey.

I think a lot of cheap shared web hosts let you upload via browser in a drag-and-drop widget. For example, neocities has a basic drag-and-drop uploader.

A Dropbox-like service that will sync a folder with a web server automatically.

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