Ask HN: Which tool/service to host a “non-techy” company's site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which tool/service to host a “non-techy” company's site

6 pointshaolez6 comments

I'm in the process of deploying a new site for my company, but only 5% of the staff is technically capable of using something like Git and a Markdown editor. The site needs to show a list retrieved via a public API and it will contain a blog, where an editor will create and publish posts.

Should we go for something like Webflow? Or is something like a static page (e.g. Netlify + Next.js + TinaCMS) easy enough to operate, once deployed?

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Wordpress can do everything you want. That's what I'd reach for.

The blog, of course, is native to WP.

Showing a list by retrieving an API should be achievable by using a plugin, or if not, you should be able to write your own pretty easily.

Make sure you turn on auto updates.

As for hosting, you could self host or use one of a bajillion hosting companies which support WP.

If I understand you correctly then you are looking for basic website for a company?

Recently my nephew built a website for his dad's "non-techy" company: https://www.punekarinitiatives.com

He used Wix and it took him a week working in his spare time.

I am a fan of static pages and if you are working with „non-technical“ folks a headless CMS might be what you are looking for.

In a recent project (Website for my mom) I went with https://prismic.io which gives a simple API/good SDKs to connect to a static site generator of your choice. Went with Nuxt as a site generator. Backups are easy as well, as I can just crawl the API. A new publish of a page triggers a new CI build via Webshop and about 60s later the page is deployed to GitLab pages.

Prismic works well for me as it allows me to create custom forms for different page types, handles media reasonably well and supports i18n out of the box.

More details in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697621

Another interesting approach is https://forestry.io which pushes the content directly to git.

At one of the companies I worked for we used the CMS API Contentful (https://www.contentful.com) together with a static site generator.

People can write content through the Contentful dashboard which has a decent editor.Your website would be notified through webhooks about changes and rebuild.

Not sure what exactly you need to do with the list that you get from the public API. If it's as simple as showing the raw content you might get away with a little bit of JavaScript embedded in Wordpress/Webflow.

webflow is great! I’ve implemented it for a non-tech company and will recommend, to the level where some non-tech people could even build parts of the site, and I just had to do the technical finishing. The cms is also super simple.

Have also done a Gatsby netlify version but any customization even changing an image is a pain and will end up on your desk.

Although if it is a very large site where templating of 100s of pages and maintenance of it will be important I would not recommend webflow and go with a react option instead.

i'd vote for any managed service

ieeg Webflow

'easy enough to operate' sites end up being a major pain in the ass.

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