Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rodeoclash | Hacker News Reader

Err, I'd say that it's getting easier then ever for one person to build a website by themselves.

- Rails/Angular go a long way to speeding up development due to the number of 3rd party libraries available for them. Need User logins? Devise. Need queue processing? Sidekiq. AngularJS is going the same way as Rails for awesome 3rd party libraries.

- Bootstrap almost solves visual design for prototypes, and it's not hard to start customising the templates or even buying a 3rd party one off the shelf. It's not going to win any awards for graphic design but it's fine for 99% of people that will be using your site.

Case in point, I built http://www.knowyourgenre.com, as site for exploring music by genres, in around 3 months (with a lot of backtracking and taking bits out that I didn't wind up using).

1 person, I did the front end, back end and graphic design for it.

Not to say that grow is a bad idea, but I don't agree with the argument that 1 person can't build a site anymore, in fact I think it's getting easier.

Thanks for putting that into words more nicely than I would have been able to. Grow looks interesting and I applaud them for the initiative, but it's hard to agree with all that they are saying when their definition of a "web page" is not at all congruent with my personal definition.

For anyone at Grow that is reading this - I think you might find more people in agreement if you show them an apples to apples comparison. Show me all that it would take to launch comparable apps on GAE vs. Grow and let that speak for itself.

OP here. I totally agree with your statement in that it's becoming easier and easier for single developers to build (and launch) something cool.

I suppose I must have glanced over this when I wrote the post, but I'm definitely targeting Grow towards producing content-heavy informational marketing web sites, blogs, portfolios, landing pages, personal sites, corporate information pages, marketing campaigns, etc.

In other words, Grow is great for teams that want to produce and manage stuff like the marketing content you see on https://stripe.com/, http://about.pinterest.com/, http://www.apple.com/mac/, http://www.google.com/think/, etc. I wouldn't recommend using Grow to build your actual product. :)

Often times, coordinating the launch of your marketing content with the launch of your product is tricky, and that's another thing I aim to solve.

Perhaps I'm not your target audience but I would precisely avoid your website because of the poor, clearly bootstrapped, design.

Other than that I completely agree with you that it's easier now more than ever to get a site up and running. Design however takes more thought than throwing some existing bootstrap styles on there.

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