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by solardev 1277 days ago
Don't DIY it. Whatever you do today will be hard to maintain in two years. You don't want to be the person he always calls for helps for updates.

Just have him put it on Wix or Squarespace or Square business or such.

Don't mess with WordPress either. Not worth the complexity for a simple business page.
1 comments
kevin_vanilla 1277 days ago
This is good advice - to clarify, when I said "DIY" I meant "DIY for him" haha. Wix has gotten a few votes here, sounds like that's the way to go. Thank you!
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solardev 1277 days ago
Yeah, especially if it's DIY for him and not you, the pagebuilders excel at that. Wix is my personal favorite, but also check out Squarespace, the completely unrelated Square business pages (especially if he already uses Square to handle payments), Weebly, etc. It's a moderately-sized space with a few established players.

What these services do that Wordpress does NOT do is abstract away the whole stack and manage all of it for the user. Your plumber pays a tiny monthly fee ($10-$20) and all he ever has to worry about is look and feel, as in he chooses a theme, adds some text and images and contact info... and done. He'll never have to worry about hosting or updates or plug-ins or "post vs page" or hierarchies of nav menus or "invalidating a cache" or "updating the database" or any of the other low-level stuff that Wordpress still makes painfully obvious.

Nothing against Wordpress, it's a powerful FOSS solution and what gave me my start in web dev, it's just no longer the best tool for the job. I've migrated several clients from Wordpress to Wix and they are MUCH happier. Wordpress will inevitably incur maintenance costs a year or two after deployment, and they'll either have to ask you back to help or hire another dev then. Even hosted on Wordpress.com with a lot of the power features disabled, it's still way too low-level compared to the actual page builder services.

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