Database driven websites have been around for a while, and whereas they have been driving tremendous opportunities for the open-source development community ,they are not any longer the answer to most of the customer requirements out there. Why is that, because most websites plain and simply do not need a database or a web server for that matter, let alone complex development languages. Keep it simply if you can and focus on the main things that are driving traffic to websites, any website – mobile friendly design, speed, speed and speed, security and reliability. Why on earth would your site slow down or crash with 100 or even 1,000 concurrent downloads or be hackable by anyone understanding how plugins or scripts work. No reason.
Other often heard objections are there’s no way for users to interact with my content!
You may think that sites built with static tools aren’t interactive, but it is not really the case. With Application Programming Interfaces (API) you can add just about any functionality you desire to your site.
Social sharing can be done with Shareaholic or ShareThis. If you want to add comments, add Disqus or LiveFyre. Why do the heavy lifting when someone elsehas already done it for you?
There are too many choices and it is too hard.
There are,admittedly, lots of choices when it comes to finding a static website generator. But that is the beauty of it. In fact, those choices are pruned significantly when you take into account exactly what you–the-user–want from a site, and how you want to make it happen.
Well we made some choices to make it easy for you. We opted for Roots (www.roots.cx) as a Static Website generator, primarily because it was build by a creative agency with corporate customers and professional designs in mind. Any marketing or corporate website will work beautifully with Roots and there are extension available to pull in any data or template you may need for your site. It is all easy to install, well documented with a relative acceptable learning curve for any developer out there.
And there isdocumentation on our APP as well, making it even easier to build andmanage the entire process – http://app.webriq.com/help/page.
Updating content istoo hard! There is no CMS.
Actually, there are quite a few options for updating content on static sites. The first and most obvious is writing and saving your content as markdown files. The majority of static site generators support markdownout-of-the-box or with the simple installation of a plugin.
If Markdown is aproblem, and it actually is for most non-technical users, there are anumber of different CMS options. Some are hosted, some are content APIs, and some live on your production machine.
Contentful is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that uses a content API to deliver your content. Contentful has integrations for static sitegenerators including Jekyll, Roots, Middleman and Metalsmith. Roots has an extension that will hook you in to Contentful and you will beable to update your content through an easy to use UI. Each time you do that, an automatic build will be generated by our platform. Contenful is ideal for larger corporate projects and where multiple contributors have to work together in a workflow with roles and permissions.
Prose.io - actually lets you navigate and create new content right on GitHub.Once you have your site up and running in a repository, you can create new posts, define URLs, write in Markdown or use their built in editor to write and format your posts. Especially usefulfor customers who have no appetite to change anything on theirwebsite without the help of a qualified developer.
WebriQ CMS - based on the open source version of Netlify CMS it combines the UI of Contentful and updates the content through the Github API to the repository of the website, completely transparent for content managers or developers.
A demo can be tested on http://app.webriq.com/help/page/demo/howto.
Our SaaS platform comes standard with a pre-build template, a repository on Github,online CMS tool to manage content, tools to add Google analytics and other scripts, Form submission tools and a rollback to previous versions of your website. Premium features include SSL certificate, Invite members to your website for development or content management (role based) and Domain redirects to single or multiple Top Level Domains.
Why wait, build your websites with the latest and greatest tools available. We need to do better then Wordpress experiences, because we can.