I don’t know how to create a website

https://mortoray.com/2018/07/09/i-dont-know-how-to-create-a-website/

by ingve • 8 years ago

47 68 8 years ago

onion2k2• 8 years ago

While the author implies that making a website is an overly complex, daunting process and things used to be so much better in the past, the key phrase in the article is this;

The tech I know may no longer be suited to do the things I want...

The old tech that the author knows doesn't work for the modern web. He says as much. If you want to build the new shiny you have to use the new shiny tools. You don't have to make a website that does all the fancy reactive, responsive, Web 3.0 stuff. You can make a site exactly how we did it 20 years ago today and it'll work fine. But if you want to build a modern website, you've got a giant pile of things to learn first.

crooked-v• 8 years ago

My personal recommndation for "modern" would be Next.js. It abstracts away all the surrounding "stuff" and lets you skip to just directly defining pages as React components, which gives you a complexity baseline that's only slightly above just writing HTML directly.

OutThisLife• 8 years ago

Next.js is amazing. Hopefully someone smart enough makes it in rust.

Rjevski4• 8 years ago

My personal recommendation would be to stay away from anything that ends in ".js" and do it the good old way with HTML & CSS.

No customer ever asked for React, or Angular, etc. I have never heard someone say "I wanted to buy your product/service but I'm not going to because you use boring HTML instead of React".

Use the good old proven stuff until you can't, and then look at your options. There are scenarios where using React/Angular/etc makes sense. But for 99% of websites, it doesn't, especially if your website is a way to showcase content/goods instead of being an application itself.

hexadecimal7e• 8 years ago

My personal recommendation is to adhere to KISS (keep it simple ####) and less is more.

If someone want to learn to do a simple website I recommend Grav CMS. No database, just edit your pages with markdown and off you go.

donatj3• 8 years ago

I really miss the days when I started almost 15 years ago sometimes when we would just build a site with Dreamweaver Templates, and FTP it up to the server when it was ready. Maybe add a CGI form if we’re feeling fancy. It was remarkably more simple to keep an understanding and mental model of the entire project.

Honestly part of me still feels like that would be good enough for most businesses these days still, but that’s just not what developers want to build.

Rjevski4• 8 years ago

This is indeed good enough; in fact there was a post recently about how demand for Ruby On Rails (a "boring", server-side MVC framework) is still going strong.

Javascript, single page apps and React are all the hype, but outside of a few unicorns (Facebook, Airbnb, etc), the "boring" way is still where most of the money is being made. A lot of businesses still rely on Wordpress for example, and while that platform is garbage from a maintenance & security perspective, it does its job and proves that customers don't actually care about your site being powered by hype technologies.

genmon• 8 years ago

The front page of Wordpress.com claims "WordPress powers 31% of the internet."

A lot of mileage in the "boring" frameworks!

ssijak• 8 years ago

I just googled Dreamweaver and it still exists! I wonder who uses and pays for such software today. I used it like 15 years ago when I was a kid, that and Microsoft Frontpage, but can`t imagine paying for Dreamweaver today.

donatj3• 8 years ago

It comes as part of the Adobe Suite license. I’ve kicked the tires recently but I don’t know who is actually still using it. ColdFusion developers I guess. I don’t know if it still holds true but the government had a lot of ColdFusion as of a few years ago.

guitarbill2• 8 years ago

Probably why static site generators are popular. Highly effective, shallow learning curve, simple.

Angostura2• 8 years ago

And those businesses just opt for a nice Weebly or Wix template, or something similar - there's no need for a developer.

typeliftr2• 8 years ago

Hell, I’m a developer and I just made myself a Squarespace blog. It’s $12/month and I set the whole thing up in a few hours.

retox2• 8 years ago

And they don't work without js enabled. It's embarrassing when I visit a web designers or developers site and it's a blank page.

newsbinator3• 8 years ago

Veering ever so slightly from the common, but entirely non-documented, approach makes it hard to get help. Places like StackOverflow are increasingly useless: instead of answers you get “Why are you doing this at all?”, “Yuck, you’re doing it all wrong, but I won’t tell you why” [...]

While I disagree with the premise (that using old approaches should still take you just as far (and further) 20 years later), I do agree with this particular quote.

Often on SO I see well-supported answers like, "that's because you're doing it wrong" without going into detail on what doing it right would mean, or better yet, suggesting alternative frameworks or patterns where what's "wrong" over here is "right" over there.

If programming in 2018 has become more like plumbing, then plumbers in 2018 have become more dogmatic, and less willing to steer novices that prefer tools like 'x' towards approaches that use tools like 'x' more often.

amelius• 8 years ago

If programming in 2018 has become more like plumbing, then plumbers in 2018 have become more dogmatic, and less willing to steer novices that prefer tools like 'x' towards approaches that use tools like 'x' more often.

Do you think that real plumbers are excited to teach novices how to do their own plumbing? Plumbing is boring, and novice technique 'x' is even more boring. And in programming tools change so fast, that you'll be explaining the same thing again in six months from now.

newsbinator3• 8 years ago

Somehow SO has solved the problem of getting experts to weigh in on questions by novices, even though experts are typically busy and the landscape of tools/patterns changes quickly.

The remaining problem to solve is getting experts not only to weigh in, but to model patterns or point to alternatives that incorporate (rather than deride) the novice's original approach.

MaxBarraclough5• 8 years ago

Often on SO I see well-supported answers like, "that's because you're doing it wrong" without going into detail

Disagree, but that might be because we frequent different territories of the StackOverflow space. I admit I don't often delve in to web-dev topics. For .Net questions, I'm continually impressed by StackOverflow's answers.

newsbinator3• 8 years ago

I used to do .net and I admit that I was always impressed in that territory too. Good point!

sheldor3• 8 years ago

While I agree that the quality of .net is impressive, I think that it follows the overall SO problem with outdated answers.

Recently I ran into the 'why Boolean.toString returns an odd "True" value', I visited SO to find a terrific [1] but outdated [2] answer.

Nowadays I shift my teams away from SO. My piece of advice would be to stay away from it (especially junior devs), until they reach a level were they can evaluate and cross check what they are reading.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/491334/why-does-boolean-... [2]https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/atahsch6(v=vs.110)....

txsh• 8 years ago

SO is getting useless. Search for anything and you have to wade through page after page of “use the search function” replies to legitimate questions. I am, you jackass. The original answer is now a broken link.

collyw• 8 years ago

Isn't this where WIX and similar products come in? Sure its a lot more complex to create a simple website from scratch, but the process is automated by tools like these. I have non technical friends with blogs these days.

avip• 8 years ago

Exactly. A vast chunk of custom "websites" could have happily lived as WiX/squarespace/medium/facebook ready-made object.

typeliftr2• 8 years ago

I’m a web developer and I just set up a Squarespace blog for myself. I could’ve taken a week to fiddle with Jeckyll and set up plugins for search and RSS, newsletters and this and that, but this is $12/month and so much easier. It took me like 2 hours to get the whole thing set up, getting a domain is a single click with no SSL setup or anything.

rotub2• 8 years ago

As a web developer myself I had never come across a CMS that made life easier for the every day person - friends would always come to me asking for help with setting up or amending their blog.

Then Squarespace came and I've been so impressed with it. It is the first and still only CMS that makes creating and maintaining* a blog super easy.

* images were always a problem with Wordpress and other sites... uploading, resizing, and more so moving and placing images on a page was always a "problem" for the non-tech-savvy but Squarespace handles this perfectly

motdiem• 8 years ago

On the security and distribution side of things, I recently had to guickly throw a website together, and found netlify super convenient for that - it handles the https and cdn part, and you can use it like a folder to drop static html. It allowed me to have something up and running faster thant I thought

klez3• 8 years ago

Web apps. You don't know how to create web apps.

An actual website (meaning text, images and little more) doesn't really need all the fancy frameworks OP's talking about. The sooner we re-learn this, the better.

retox2• 8 years ago

Im getting a lot of mileage out of Express/Polka, postgres, handlebars and vanilla js. Redis is good for rate limiting and session store if necessary. Yes it's not one package but I don't need most of the stuff the big bois are offering.

de_watcher• 8 years ago

Of course web apps are hard. They run in this weird VM that wasn't even designed for the applications. The popularity caused by the ease of deployment made us brute-force the solutions for the actual development tools, and they keep searching for themselves by sprawling frameworks and libraries for the same thing all the time.

kowdermeister4• 8 years ago

They run in this weird VM that wasn't even designed for the applications.

I keep reading this and it was probably true 10 years ago, but JS has evolved quite a bit since. Browser differences are now marginal (yes I've seen the outline hack) and now these funny little VM-s are designed for the applications.

moviuro• 8 years ago

An actual website (meaning text, images and little more) doesn't really need all the fancy frameworks OP's talking about.

Sure, but you still need:

- a server/reverse proxy (h2o, apache, nginx, httpd, etc.), in which you correctly set tons of things, such as headers [0], https (acme.sh? or acme-client?)

- haproxy for IPv4/IPv6 if you want to live in the future, but still be available to people living in the past century [1]

Default versions and settings are still broken (SSL still enabled in 2018, etc.)... Mozilla does help though by publishing some sane templates [2].

In the end, it's not quite as complex as webapps, but still very far from trivial.

[0] https://securityheaders.com/?q=try.popho.be&followRedirects=... for my own static blog, https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hellobank.f... & https://securityheaders.com/?q=particuliers.secure.lcl.fr&fo... for French banks...

[1] https://try.popho.be/https.html

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat... and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security

klez3• 8 years ago

True, but you can still get a ton of mileage from a simple managed web hosting solution and (if you feel fancy) cloudfront.

My point is that this whole post reeks a bit of YAGNI. Or, at least, that we're not talking about "simple websites". If it's the latter, of course, it's a whole different story. But we should call websites "websites" and web applications "web applications". This would also avoid those "the web sucks" arguments that make comments think an article is thinking about the web as "a way to exchange information" instead of "a platform to distribute system-agnostic applications".

kerrsclyde• 8 years ago

I kind of agree but I've just followed the approach of building in what I know, it's too easy to get caught up in alternative cutting edge tech and use it as an excuse not to build something.

If you wind up with something successful you can always switch to modern technology if it provides a solution which your old school tech cannot fix.

orbifold• 8 years ago

It is incredibly easy to create a website. As a member of a university institute you typically get a folder in your home directory "public_html", whatever you put there will be accessible from the internet. So you create an index.html, which basically can be as malformed as you want it to be and it shows up in Google search after a while. This totally suffices for 90% of all personal internet publishing, see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html for how far this can take you. This page contains ~20 years of original content by a mathematical physicist, a lot of it is of very high quality. Content is more important than presentation.

okaleniuk• 8 years ago

I'm doing https://wordsandbuttons.online with all the interactive plots, and games, and quizzes in plain Javascript. It was a bit uncomfortable in the beginning, but then I gained some experience and got better at it. I didn't want any frameworks when I started, now I don't need them.

kowdermeister4• 8 years ago

I no longer know how to create a website.

You do, but you are suffering from analysis paralysis. Fuck it and stick to what you know, your _web app_ will be fine.

For websites you need VSCode, type ![tab] and you are ready to go.

I feel it's easier than ever to get started with frontend frameworks since there are tons of resources to learn from (youtube, course platforms, blog post, official tutorials, etc.) compared to 10 years ago.

As a footnote, I could write a similar blog post about Haskell, but I feel I could use that time better to watch a 1 hour long video and write a fibonacci function.

mdewar2• 8 years ago

I couldn't agree more.

I don’t know why this attracts people to programming — imagine trying to be a chef where the only source of ingredients is scouring the city for restaurant scraps.

I feel this is so untrue - there is a wealth of information on web-dev. The hard part is choosing what resource to use or what topic to study but in terms of learning content available - I think there is oceans.

karol• 8 years ago

Apart from websites there are now other things that people deliver via HTTP and browser or a "web view". I would argue that the market for websites has shrunk. There is a booming market for web applications that are just the best way to create a gateway between customers and ever changing business logic. In this space there is a proliferation of tooling and compilers and it's only going to get more complicated in the sake of betterment (JS as a compilation target). I'd focus on fundamentals, one of which is user experience. It doesn't matter if the flow is created in Go, React or closure, it still needs to be user-friendly, intuitive and secure at the same time. The domain knowledge is much more important than tooling.

rotub2• 8 years ago

I agree.

I was in the web dev world early enough to also be uploading pages and files via FTP to production for high profile clients.

In the last 3-5 years with the addition of gulp, sass, npm, etc. it has all become way too complicated and saturated. I found myself with way to many options and worse - opinions - to filter through, learn, and master enough to use in production. Mostly this learning would be done in my own time outside of work and I really started to lose interest/drive to do it.

kowdermeister4• 8 years ago

Oh the nostalgia of fucking up websites with FTP :) You can say it was better than deploying with Git with a serious face.

johnlbevan22• 8 years ago

I think a lot of us technical minded people fall into the same trap; we start with the technology, trying to solve problems of making a site dynamic and secure before considering the content. With the exception of sites solely aimed at demonstrating new technologies, the purpose of a site is to provide content (OK, sometimes to provide functionality too; but that's content in a sense). The key is to work out what content needs to be on the site & start with that. Once you've got that down you can consider how it can be improved; and that's where these other pieces start coming in. But start by defining the problem to be addressed, then look for the tool to fix that problem; don't go off and find something trendy then work out how you can make problems that it can handle, or how you can force your problem into being the kind of problem which that tool could fix; move on and find the tool that makes sense.

This is all obvious at the start of the project, but the moment you see a rabbit hole it's very hard to resist going down it. For that, keep a list of what's important nearby, and each time you get back from a break check that list and ensure you're obeying it. That list will start with a bunch of don'ts; to keep you away from bad habits, followed by your priority task list of what you need to create your MVP / the MUSTS of your solution. Once you have a working solution and have ticked off all the musts from your list, you can then play safe in the knowledge that you've got a checked in working version; and the remaining time is just experimenting / tweaking / playing.

Anyway, that's the theory... I've not managed to stick to it yet; let me know if it works for you though ;).

ratsimihah• 8 years ago

If you keep up with React, it's super easy. It takes 5 minutes to get CRA working, then an hour to understand React, then days to get good at React, then a few more days to get good at the ecosystem (state management, etc...)

I agree with what you said. The pace of change is daunting, but as long as you keep an eye on where it's headed and what's working, things get easier.

ezoe• 8 years ago

There are people who do cargo-cult programming.

They looks like doing something. They use the famous tool and write seemingly similar code we write. But it's not correct. It's not just correct, It's also wrong in all aspects. They don't understand anything. They just imitate the activities and believe it just work somehow.

When facing it, the only answer we can give them are:

“Why are you doing this at all?”

“Yuck, you’re doing it all wrong, but I won’t tell you why”

Because, these people don't want to learn in the hard way or listen to the advice anyway.

So the last advice,

“can you produce a complete working minimal example, deploy it somewhere, set up an issue system, accept code reviews, feed my dog, and then maybe I’ll help”.

is actually a kind advice, because these cargo-cult programmers blindly believe that, they are doing it right, it should just work, and the reason it's not working right now is a very tiny trivial issue caused by one wrong setting or something.

Since they don't listen the honest advice(you're doing it wrong in everything) and believe it will work, let them fail and let them know they are doing it wrong is the most kind advice.

pdimitar• 8 years ago

You are not wrong but in the end I just prefer not to answer their questions at all. Somebody else will probably be kinder than myself and I am quite sharp on forums because I dislike people who tried exactly zero solutions but just come and cry somewhere. I know sharp language is frowned upon in the moderated forums and viewed as not constructive so I just say to myself "heh, that poor thing" and never even write a reply, and move on with my life.

Better for everyone involved IMO.

I don’t know how to create a website

Related Stories