Ask HN: What platform are you building a niche site on in 2023?

29 points by joshdance 3 years ago | 22 comments

If you wanted to create a niche site (articles monetize with ads or affiliate links) what platform are you building it on in 2023?

Wordpress is probably the default.

Webflow is new but their blogging interface is frankly bad.

Ghost is an option but has less plugins that Wordpress.

What would you choose?

One wrinkle is that we want to include custom coded pages (calculators, interactive examples) as well. Any CMS systems play well easily with custom code?

throwaway0asd 3 years ago |

Localhost. This frees you of all kinds of limitations. The browser becomes a true OS view port with proper security since you control what third party code (if any) is exposed to your user.

What is normally the server instead becomes the actual local application written in any language, though I choose Node and TypeScript for this. You can still have an actual remote web server (optionally plural) though, your app just proxies to them.

Performance dramatically improves because for most of the content and application code network transmission concerns are eliminated. At that point your application code either performs like a native app or your incompetence is fully exposed.

Your website gains the full expressive capabilities of your operating system plus any application running in a shell.

You can still run the site from a vanity domain with your company’s HTTP certificates. Have a subdomain that points to a loopback IP, such as https://local.I-love-my-users.com pointing to 127.0.0.1 and ::1. You will need HTTP certificates bind associate that domain to those IPs and resolves to the same revocation chain as your other HTTPS certificates for your other certificates.

I strongly you recommend you try it before you complain about running your next user facing site from localhost.

paxys 3 years ago |

Static site generators + free/cheap static hosting (usually bundling CDN, edge hosting, custom domains, TLS, SSR, functions, auth and more by default) are getting more and more attractive by the day, and IMO they are mature enough now to cover most web hosting use cases.

For building – Next.js, Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll/Octopress, Gridsome, Hexo, Astro, Eleventy

For hosting – Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Github Pages, Render, Firebase, S3

coding123 3 years ago |

I don't consider wordpress plugins a value. The more plugins you install, the higher the attack surface and less tested your overall setup is.

I am a developer with 30 years of experience. I installed a WP site for my wife with some plugins and themes. Within a few days I had tons of porn and 100 megabyte files being dumped on the server. I tried cleaning it up a ton of times, and looked for whatever plugin or script was being exploited.

After a few more days Google flagged it for being compromised, so I erased the server off amazon after some content backups, created a new server and deployed a Docker image with static content. Then I wrote to google saying I have deployed something that is impossible to hack: A static site being deployed in Docker so the host is not compromise-able. Google cleared the flag the next day.

ecornflak 3 years ago |

Every once in a while I go through an “I want a website” phase and try something new, but always end up back with Wordpress.

Ultimately I wanted to write content and play around with CSS making it look nice, and Wordpress handles that. Many of the other options felt like I was forever tweaking things or upgrading a dependency or something - very much mike the old days of Linux where making the modem work was an achievement.

If I couldn’t use Wordpress I’d probably go with Jekyll or Ghost.

warrenm 3 years ago | |

I agree - Wordpress is amply good enough (or overkill...which is still "good enough) for probably >95% of all use cases

Comevius 3 years ago |

Astro + Cloudflare Pages is pretty good. You can start with just a static site, fetch content from anywhere, including Markdown files or an API, and you can provide interactivity in islands.

https://astro.build/

mod 3 years ago | |

Tangent: Man this landing page is hard to read. For the record, I'm a full stack web programmer.

What the fuck is an island?

"Lazy loading islands" What?

"Components only hydrate when they scroll in to view" WHAT?

"Need interactive UI? Load individual, non-blocking component islands in parallel." WHAAAT!?

"...and live server output (SSR)" SSR = Live Server Output. OOOOOOOkay.

50 acronyms later and I'm way too fatigued to try this shit out.

cercatrova 3 years ago | | |

What kind of full stack technologies do you use? In the JS world at least, these are all defined terms for at least some time now. The only new thing is islands, which is explained on the landing page in the section Introducing Astro Islands.

Sometimes content has terms of art, it is not their fault for assuming that the reader should know what certain common phrases and acronyms are. It's like being on Hacker News and having to have HN, YC and PG spelled out for readers; it's assumed being on HN that readers know what these are.

karimf 3 years ago |

I’m working at Makeswift, and this could be exactly what you’re looking for. Basically, Makeswift is a visual builder for Next.js. It’s a drag-and-drop website builder, similar to Webflow, but you can easily extend it by using a custom React component.

So if your team is already using React or Next.js, you can reuse the same components you already have and use them in Makeswift to build custom-coded pages.

thegoatman 3 years ago |

I don't like to complicate things or chase the newest shinny thing. So that's why I always use WordPress to build landing pages.

You can do so many things for free(lots of tutorials online, community help, easy to find codes) or hire a pro for cheap.

is0tope 3 years ago |

For my blog, Hugo + Netlify. It's free, simple to use and works well.

MisterSandman 3 years ago | |

Same but Hugo + GitHub pages

kbrannigan 3 years ago |

WordPress is pretty hard to beat. Despite all the fancy js, webpack etc...

WordPress just chugs along. It's like an old farm tractor... Not the most pretty but gets the job done

h4waii 3 years ago |

I think my e-commerce site is niche, I don't have huge amounts of monthly traffic but product sales pay all my monthly bills.

It's just static HTML deployed to CloudFlare Pages with a $9/month Shopify button, and a $2/year VPS acting as an API endpoint.

I've used Ghost, WordPress, Hugo, Pelican, etc...and would 100% go with a static site generator over a full blown CMS.

Vibgyor5 3 years ago |

Actually, can anyone identify what platform/theme this website is built on? https://www.jeffsu.org/ This is a content creator on YouTube+Google PMM, love their website format

PKop 3 years ago | |

https://builtwith.com/jeffsu.org

Vibgyor5 3 years ago | | |

What an handy resource! Thanks

liveware 3 years ago | |

The source code mentions Ghost [https://ghost.org/].

PainfullyNormal 3 years ago |

IMHO, the sweet spot for me is still writing raw html, css and php and throwing it up onto a shared server somewhere via sftp. Quick, easy, and extendable. It's too bad the good WYSIWYG editors have died out.

thedangler 3 years ago |

For custom dev I use Laravel + livewire + postgresql And I'm starting to use Elixir with LiveView in Phoenix more too.

For fast websites that need no code I use https://sytscope.com I've used it to build websites and funnels

It has almost all features anyone could need: Drag and drop interface, Lots of widgets, Funnels + A/B Testing, Pre made templates, Blocks, Blogging, Membership areas that can be subscribed to, e-commerce - (digital, recurring or physical products), Email Automation and Campaigns, Simple integrations.

Its inexpensive and its only priced in CAD so USD saves like 30% lol

Good luck hunting.

gremlinsinc 3 years ago | |

Same with tall stack, lately though I use filament exclusively for the backend/CMS and just blade and Alpine and live wire on front/public facing.

farseer 3 years ago |

Wordpress with a small set of free, commercial and custom plugins. Typically around ~15. Allows you to focus on the content and not on the stack.