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by jariel 2216 days ago
Yet again another company with mangled communications, please, please, would be Engineers making products, make sure that you communicate 'what it is' above all else.

The top-level marketing jargon is always the same: "Make your site in minutes, not weeks! Deploy globally! Uses modern tech"

Sure, that's ok.

But the 'How it works' visual on the page explains nothing really, it's just a pile of buzzwords.

The 'QuickStart' goes right into *command line installs of technology.

WTF DOES IT DO?

Are we point-and-click building hosted sites like Shopify? Do they even host? Is it just a web framework? A cloud-based dev environment?

Some people are attracted to 'new tech' like candy and will love to dig into this. I used to be this, but now after years of rabbit holes and a lot more experience, I've realized that the onus is on the 'maker' to explain, and frankly, my (your!) time is valuable.

Please take the time to make a small introductory section that uses a few words as possible to get the meaning across to a 'technically minded business person' or even a 'developer totally unfamiliar with the tech'.
2 comments
alphachloride 2216 days ago
I agree. The website is constricting its audience.

Gatsby is a static[1] site generator of sorts. It compiles your source code/text into a HTML site at design time. So you don't have to rely on setting up a database and server for your website. It is not quite like other static site generators like Hugo or Jekyll. They use markdown files which are compiled to HTML. Gatsby instead uses javascript files with functions that return HTML that is rendered as a page. By using a programming language to define web pages, the designer gets some flexibility when creating a static site.

It is different from a dynamic[2] hosting application like Wordpress where you have a database entry which is queried and rendered into a page at run time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_web_page [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_web_page

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jariel 2216 days ago
So this is exactly it. Reading this 'I get it'.

A variation of what you wrote that should be on the landing page.

link
cellis 2216 days ago
If you can't take the time to figure out what it does, then you're not the target market. It's really not that hard. It's a web framework for building static sites. As it says right in the hero of the site:

"Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps"

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