Thought I’d crowdsource some ideas for this one. I created a site a couple years ago for my step-dad’s fishing charter business. I just took a free template that I liked and tweaked it for his needs. Whenever there are updates to be made, such as adding new pictures, changing the site text, or adding new pricing sheets, etc., he contacts me and I manually edit the html to reflect the changes.
I’d like to switch the site over to use a static site CMS or builder and give him and his business’s co-owner access to make edits themselves. The interface to make change will need to be foolproof for even a simpleton. I don’t have the patience or time to spend much effort redesigning the site, so whatever the backend is, it needs to have some decent templates/themes to build off of. I’ll do the initial site migration/redesign to the new platform, but would like to punt the ball for them to make any future edits they need without having to contact me to do it. I’ll take daily backups to ensure any fuck-ups on their part can be quickly reversed.
Any ideas for this? I’m using Grav for another project and it seems decent. But even Grav seems a little too advanced for them, so I’d like some alternatives to evaluate. Thanks in advance for any help with this!
To be honest I’m not too happy with the current design. Finding a nice, simple template that has a photo gallery and/or Facebook feed plugin would be killer though.
Have never used wordpress in my life. Would it be simple for a non-tech person to use to make changes? If I’d have to manually rebuild and deploy the static site every time they make a change, then I’m no better off than where I’m at now.
That’s pretty surprising! Yes, WordPress is incredibly intuitive (for the most part). I wouldn’t personally use it in professional environments (preference and performance reasons), but for people who need things to be simple, it’s generally one of the easiest routes.
WordPress is super intuitive to that extent. My mother (non techy) is able to Update her blog and single pages just fine now after initial setup
I’ve also got a lifetime license of https://elegantthemes.com which comes with 110+ premade layouts in their library directly available in wp editor and some more 300 layouts you can manually import from them^^
And if the 2-3seconds load time Divi (wp) has is too long, WP2Static converts your wp page to a static page which loads in 300-400ms but you still have all Divi/Elegantthemes/wp advantages during building the site before making it static.
I’ve also been looking for something similar, interesting that people are suggesting just using WordPress and converting to static as I thought that would require a lot of overhead (in terms of setting up WordPress then converting to static). Completely valid idea of course but I’m just shocked there isn’t something more simple.
Back in the day I used to use something called cutenews which was essentially just a PHP script that let you manage posts and then just add one line of PHP into your otherwise html layout and it could pull categories and news (or posts) based on the parameters of the PHP you pasted in to your page. Does anyone know of anything similar?
From my experience this works great. Especially if you have an awesome sitebuilder like Divi/Elegantthemes with lots of pre-made layouts and even more free wp layouts out there that you can combine with Divi builder, using all its features to create a website on the fly, then make static and go
Elegant Themes releases a new Divi layout pack each week that can be loaded directly from within Divi using the Visual Builder. Each layout pack is designed for a specific niche and comes with 6-9 page templates and all are 100% free for personal or commercial use.
I’m currently playing with Publii and it is awesome! You can also set it sync with other computers via dropbox (or any other sync software) which should allow you to edit the website on multiple computers.
Get it set up nicely with the new editor and it’s pretty easy to edit pages/posts. Anything “non standard” is easy enough to make into a “block” to be reused.
I disagree with @Ympker and find Divi quite bad. It’s editor doesn’t really show you how the page will look (and it’s really, really, slow) where as if you setup the new editor correctly the page is shown as it will look (you can pull in front end styles into the editor).
Well, it’s been argued quite often that Divi doesn’t produce the fastest websites from the get-go but I have to say that after a little tweaking I’ve been happy with my results. Even with no tweaking I didn’t feel the websites would load so slow to turn potential visitors away. That being said I don’t need the page to load in 1 second anyway. I pretty much like the idea of Elegant themes splitting the Divi Builder in two parts. The Visual editor for the front-end and the “back-end” editor for building the skeleton. Usually I quickly setup a skeleton, then proceed using the visual builder for the front-end. As for Wordpress’s “new” Gutenberg editor, I believe it bears a lot of potential. One day it will add a lot of value to WordPress, as it will make some page builder plugins which potentially slow down the site unnecessary, however, that day is still far in the future. Not only have page builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder or Oxygen refined their workflow and features but also is Gutenberg right now still often criticized and has quite the poor rating on WP plugins (2/5). I also don’t find it appealing in its’ current form. Maybe I’m too used to Divi’s workflow. Regardless, there are enough builders/themes/plugins out there just like opinions. As long as you find something that works for you it’s great
Oh I agree it’s not perfect, and certainly not a “one thing does all” solution.
I don’t want to derail the thread so won’t go into Divi too much - it’s slow from an editorial point of view. One site recently took 20 seconds (frozen page until loaded) for the editor to load. I don’t do enough with it to really benefit probably. The visual skeleton is nice to see though, and it does have more built in that gutenberg.
In standard form, the new WP editor is pretty basic to be fair, but load in some front end styles, enable “wide” editing and it gets a lot nicer.
