Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website(weejur.com)

5 points by npilk 26 days ago | 9 comments

It's easier than ever for anyone to make a website, even without paying for a drag-and-drop builder like Squarespace. But there are still too many barriers for your average non-technical person to publish a site on the web.

I'd bet most people don't know there are free ways to host a website, and even if they find an explainer, technical platforms like Cloudflare and GitHub (let alone the command line) can be intimidating.

So I made weejur, which is basically a super simple UI front-end for GitHub Pages. You log in with OAuth, and then you can just paste HTML or upload files to publish a website. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can sign up right in the OAuth flow. It's completely free, and you can view the source here [1].

My hope is this makes it easier for people who don't know anything about web hosting to create and share their own websites.

Feel free to try it out and please share any questions/ideas/feedback!

[1] https://github.com/weejur/weejur/

natloz 24 days ago |

As I read your post I see terms like GitHub, OAuth, OAuth flow; these are already technical terms that many people would not understand. How could you describe this to your target audience? Just curious.

npilk 22 days ago | |

Basically as you see on the website - “Connect to GitHub and publish”, “GitHub Pages is a free service to host websites”, etc.

I do think the target user for this would probably have needed to heard of GitHub to really “get it” - but maybe they just know it’s something developers use, and not any more than that.

scorpion888 25 days ago |

This is a nice idea.

There is still a real gap between "making some HTML" and actually getting something published on the web, especially for non-technical users. A simple path on top of GitHub Pages makes a lot of sense.

Curious how you are thinking about the next step after publish. Do you want weejur to stay intentionally minimal, or do you see it growing toward simple editing / updating workflows too?

yofmaker 25 days ago |

Nice app, but you mentioned for non-technical people to paste html and files. If the person is completely non-technical this is even something hard if they don't watch video guide or something like that. I mean why would they use this when they can build their sites with ai website builders like lovable, v0.app (which already has vercel integration)?

npilk 25 days ago | |

Sure, Lovable/v0 free tier is a good option, although I’m not sure how many non-tech people use them for things like personal sites or to quickly publish something they want to share. It feels like they’re going more after “builders”, and regular folks would be more using ChatGPT free tier, etc.

Mainly it’s always bothered me that Squarespace etc can charge so much for simple static sites. I just don’t think most people realize you can host websites for free if you don’t need a database.

Isolated_Routes 25 days ago |

This is cool! I like projects that simplify things for non-technical users, while also educating them

Panzerschrek 25 days ago |

Creating a Github-pages hosted site isn't that complex. The biggest burden is to purchase a domain and connect it with a hosting.

vednig 25 days ago |

It's like static.app

npilk 25 days ago | |

Sweet, didn’t know about this - yes, this is very similar.