Business Idea targeting web designers/developers

zig

So Ive been pondering this idea for a few weeks. I didnt see the point in posting it in the business section because people there may not understand it.

What do you think of this idea?

Basically a cloud interface for building a site which then provides all the data as widgets, allowing you to build your own site in HTML while still allowing clients to easily edit their content.

Lets call it "Web Widgets" (I woudlnt actually call it that btw)

1. You sign up to Web Widgets as a developer
2. Add a client account (this generates some JS snippet for you to include in your websites HTML)
3. Start adding all different types of elements to this account and use the services built in stuff, so for instance you could add a slider and upload images to it, you could just add images itself, or add text boxes, or even forms , basically anything a decent brochure site might contain.
4. Each of these elements has some sort of ID associated with it while building your page.
5. Going back to your HTML you then add the JS snippet and call all the different elements by their ID.

The purpose of this being you still have total freedom to code your site using simple JS/HTML/Javascript but without the clunkiness of a framework, or without the restriction of a site builder (like weebly).

Pros:

1. Super secure, your site has no back end
2. No updates required
3. Learner HTML/CSS coders could use it and then use Web Widgets to supply them with the harder stuff.
4. Easy local development, no XAMMP, Vagrant or other server types
5. No need to learn a back end language (may be suitable for designers with just some front end coding knowledge) and no need to learn about setting up WordPress or another CMS that uses back end language.
6. No need for CDNs (it is one itself effectively), so super fast websites
7. Even though the sites are built in HTML/CSS only , the clients can still easily log in and update their own content without worrying about messing everything up
8. Your website would be unhackable, its just HTML
9. Good front end developers still have total freedom, unlike if they were using something like Weebly or Wix.
10. You could still sell themes and provide HTML templates and a pre-set up client account.

Cons:

1. Most developers, even limited experienced ones can seem to work their way around WordPress or the likes so why would they bother changing.
2. Maybe not a massive market vs cost of promotion/hosting/marketing/development
3. Any serious more advanced sites with specific custom functionality would have to be ruled out, at least in the initial stages until Web Widgets gets more advanced
4. Likewise, websites with customer accounts, ecommerce, etc, would have to be handled differently, not saying Web Widgets couldnt eventually provide even a means of an ecommerce platform but you are getting closer and closer to the likes of Weebly if not careful.

counterpointaud

I don't get this.

What is served to the client ultimately, just HTML?

So it's basically a pre-rendered static site, with a CMS?

How is authentication handled?

Where does the data live if there is no back-end? If there is no data then why not just use a static site generator like Gatsby or Jekyll and host it on Netlify and call it a day?

14ned

zig wrote: »

Basically a cloud interface for building a site which then provides all the data as widgets, allowing you to build your own site in HTML while still allowing clients to easily edit their content.

I'd start with a wrapper for generating https://gohugo.io/ sites using a pretty web UI instead of forcing the poor users to write actual Markdown (the horror!). Bundle in a few precanned Hugo snippets (what you call widgets). Charge them €10 to upload a copy of the Hugo project for their finished site to github for them, or €0.10/1Mb/month to host it for them.

As everything's static HTML, maintenance costs will be extremely low, unlike with Wordpress. Could be a nice little earner that.

Niall

John_Mc

Any problems with SEO given that the content is loaded by JS?

zig

counterpointaud wrote: »

How is authentication handled?

Where does the data live if there is no back-end? If there is no data then why not just use a static site generator like Gatsby or Jekyll and host it on Netlify and call it a day?

No those tools arent what Im talking about, but thanks for introducing me Netlify because this idea could parner with them in the same way they have partnered with Jekyll. Also those tools still require a server environment etc.

What Im talking about is this, supposing you were building a single page HTML website that only consisted of a few google maps embeds.

Well then you'd go onto google maps, create your embeds, connect to the api and load up the maps. So in that case Google is hosting the data, but you're hosting the basic HTML.

My idea would take it further and have lots of things, content boxes, sliders, single images, lots of lots of features which would all get rendered in your HTML, meaning you can still freely build and host your own site but have an external CMS worrying about the content. The authentication would come from the fact that only you (or your client) has access to the account holding this data on the interface of "Web Widgets"

John_Mc wrote: »

Any problems with SEO given that the content is loaded by JS?

After doing some looking Im pretty sure this shouldnt be an issue. Google crawls dynamically generated content. You might run into issues with stuff like "Load More" features alright so that would have to be looked at. But that problem applies anyway to any site.

webfruits

Headless CMS it sounds like
https://headlesscms.org/ has a bunch of them you can look up

s7ryf3925pivug

Wrt 4, use classes not ids.

I think you'd run into issues with naming conflicts between different widgets, given devs would be working on separate projects on the site, as I understand it.

Widgets often are highly configurable. Setting a lot of parameters declaratively for each instance would be messy.

I think you'd find various considerations like these would push you away from the predefined declarative approach. Simpler for consumers to define class selectors themselves with the specific widgets and configurations they want to use. At this point, your idea becomes a hosting service for JavaScript libraries.

Glancing at your pros list, I really don't see any benefits wrt security or why it would affect needing a backend/local server etc.