I get your point, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter.
Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.
Almost daily I have friends/family come to me with a business idea that starts off as "it will be easy.. just like <huge site> but with blah".
Non-tech people honestly think 'websites' are simple things, and we should be able to knock-out a Facebook or Twitter clone in a few days.
It wasn't that long ago that everyone had a 13 year old nephew that made websites. Also it is easier to create a very simple website than to create a very simple desktop app, since a simple website doesn't really do anything. There's really no equivalent desktop app to the Geocities type websites.
Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.
I'm really surprised that people actually look at the websites of multi-million dollar internet-only companies and think it must be easy to build something worth that much.
Why does it matter to the average Joe how much a random Tech company is worth? at the end of the day, it's all made up anyway, and the vast majority are waaaaay to concerned with their next payment to think about that stuff anyway.
I'm a developer so I know how to do these things but for the average person...
Where do I type that?
By the way.. What is apt-get? What is nginx?
Why put the index.html in /var/www?
Why use nginx I've heard of apache why wouldn't I use that?
You haven't even detailed how to setup a linux that would use apt. And why not centos?
Where is the site going to be hosted, AWS/Digital Ocean/ Linode/ Heroku? How do they properly configure the machine to serve to internet?
How are my non-technical clients/employees/founders/etc. going to update it without bugging me all the time?
In other words my friend you've grossly over simplified the process of putting a website on the internet where other people can get to it and making it easily updatable by laymen
Exactly, no average person will be questioning the choice of apache over nginx or vice-versa. Nor will they be evaluating choice of hosting provider. The average person probably has no clue what AWS is.
Instead the average person can be expected to google for something along the lines of "free website" or something similar, arrive at wordpress/blogger/tumblr/squarespace/flavour-of-month .com and just create an account.
And that's where the divide resides. Some people take great pleasure in doing everything from scratch and having endless configurability. Everyone else wants to throw something together and push a button to let the world use it.
I'd like to build just a website and have the rest set to an automatic that I really don't care about configuring.
The premise, for non-technical is perfect. I've heard stakeholders and clients saying that making a website is like pushing a button.
The project itself seems interesting nonetheless. I just need to see the limitations of it.
As nginx and others can be quite powerful.
Comments
All I want to do is build a web site.
Poof.I find the writeup similarly misleading.
"all I want to do is build a web site"...
"... hosted on google apps..".
... manage content
... collaborate among team members
... CMSy stuff.
So in other words, all you want to do is build a pipelined product. Which is totally cool - but it's definitely not just building a web site.
I get your point, and I think it gets to the heart of the matter.
Now that everyone uses Facebook, Gmail, Amazon, Twitter on a daily basis, the average person thinks of those as simple 'websites', that are easy to build.
Almost daily I have friends/family come to me with a business idea that starts off as "it will be easy.. just like <huge site> but with blah".
Non-tech people honestly think 'websites' are simple things, and we should be able to knock-out a Facebook or Twitter clone in a few days.
For some reason non-tech people think desktop applications are always hard to create, and web sites are always simple.
You can extend that to apps too. I can't count the number of items friends/family have had "great" ideas for apps that we could split the profit on.
It wasn't that long ago that everyone had a 13 year old nephew that made websites. Also it is easier to create a very simple website than to create a very simple desktop app, since a simple website doesn't really do anything. There's really no equivalent desktop app to the Geocities type websites.
I'm really surprised that people actually look at the websites of multi-million dollar internet-only companies and think it must be easy to build something worth that much.
I would estimate that 99% of the people I know that use Facebook / Twitter / Gmail etc. think they are worth basically $0.
After all, who do you know that has paid to use them?
(obviously, I understand the reality, but most don't)
Now that's depressing.
Why does it matter to the average Joe how much a random Tech company is worth? at the end of the day, it's all made up anyway, and the vast majority are waaaaay to concerned with their next payment to think about that stuff anyway.
I'm a developer so I know how to do these things but for the average person...
Where do I type that? By the way.. What is apt-get? What is nginx?
Why put the index.html in /var/www?
Why use nginx I've heard of apache why wouldn't I use that?
You haven't even detailed how to setup a linux that would use apt. And why not centos?
Where is the site going to be hosted, AWS/Digital Ocean/ Linode/ Heroku? How do they properly configure the machine to serve to internet?
How are my non-technical clients/employees/founders/etc. going to update it without bugging me all the time?
In other words my friend you've grossly over simplified the process of putting a website on the internet where other people can get to it and making it easily updatable by laymen
That kind of average person would be better off just using squarespace.com or similar SaaS. It's what they were designed for.
Exactly, no average person will be questioning the choice of apache over nginx or vice-versa. Nor will they be evaluating choice of hosting provider. The average person probably has no clue what AWS is.
Instead the average person can be expected to google for something along the lines of "free website" or something similar, arrive at wordpress/blogger/tumblr/squarespace/flavour-of-month .com and just create an account.
And that's where the divide resides. Some people take great pleasure in doing everything from scratch and having endless configurability. Everyone else wants to throw something together and push a button to let the world use it.
I'd like to build just a website and have the rest set to an automatic that I really don't care about configuring.
One web page, likely hosted from a dynamic IP address, does not a web site make, and it is misleading to suggest otherwise. ;-)
Indeed it was - deliberately so :) That was, in a way, part of my point.
The premise, for non-technical is perfect. I've heard stakeholders and clients saying that making a website is like pushing a button. The project itself seems interesting nonetheless. I just need to see the limitations of it. As nginx and others can be quite powerful.
To a client that's what building a website is. Yes you are literally building their product for them but to them it's just a website.