I've agreed to help build a new website for a couple of musician friends. I used to do loads of website stuff, but I'm a bit out of touch with the technology, so I was wondering what sort of things people would recommend looking at now?
A few pertinent points:
- My friends are very non-technical, but need to be responsible for maintaining content (text, images, video, sound files, gig dates etc.).
- I am happy to manage the more technical stuff, including layout and design, maintenance, updates etc.
- It needs to be relatively cheap to host, so probably nothing too exotic or weird, though I'm totally happy to learrn new skills in order to put this together.
My most recent experience was using NextJS with Sanity headless CMS, publishing to Netlify. This works fairly well, but I've gone off NextJS and React in general, so I'd prefer to avoid it this time round. Prior to that I have had some experience with Wordpress, Contentful, built loads of sites in Rails, and also done loads of bespoke CMS work in various languages (PHP, .net, Ruby, Node, the list goes on).
My friends have been using Wix, but the results have been pretty poor, and the platform is expensive for what they want. They have been recommended Squarespace, and I suggested that they look at Wordpress, but I thought I'd ask on here in case anyone has some hot tips for nice platforms to look at? I'm happy enough to do the legwork on design, so the templating stuff you get with those probably isn't required.
Back in the day, it was all about the server CMS platforms (e.g. Drupal, Joomla etc.), and I assume they're still around now? I'd really like to avoid all the heavy JS stuff as I find it pretty unenjoyable to work with
My preference would be a nice server-side language serving static pages with a light sprinkling of JS where needed. I'm interested in HTMX and similar frameworks in order to facilitate this, but I don't have any practical experience with them.
Thoughts and ideas most welcome! Thanks
A few pertinent points:
- My friends are very non-technical, but need to be responsible for maintaining content (text, images, video, sound files, gig dates etc.).
- I am happy to manage the more technical stuff, including layout and design, maintenance, updates etc.
- It needs to be relatively cheap to host, so probably nothing too exotic or weird, though I'm totally happy to learrn new skills in order to put this together.
My most recent experience was using NextJS with Sanity headless CMS, publishing to Netlify. This works fairly well, but I've gone off NextJS and React in general, so I'd prefer to avoid it this time round. Prior to that I have had some experience with Wordpress, Contentful, built loads of sites in Rails, and also done loads of bespoke CMS work in various languages (PHP, .net, Ruby, Node, the list goes on).
My friends have been using Wix, but the results have been pretty poor, and the platform is expensive for what they want. They have been recommended Squarespace, and I suggested that they look at Wordpress, but I thought I'd ask on here in case anyone has some hot tips for nice platforms to look at? I'm happy enough to do the legwork on design, so the templating stuff you get with those probably isn't required.
Back in the day, it was all about the server CMS platforms (e.g. Drupal, Joomla etc.), and I assume they're still around now? I'd really like to avoid all the heavy JS stuff as I find it pretty unenjoyable to work with
My preference would be a nice server-side language serving static pages with a light sprinkling of JS where needed. I'm interested in HTMX and similar frameworks in order to facilitate this, but I don't have any practical experience with them.Thoughts and ideas most welcome! Thanks
