One Website Needs Three Tools for Links, QR, and Pages
Creators and small businesses are frustrated with existing website building tools. They desire flexibility and customization beyond basic templates, often needing multiple tools for different functionalities like link-in-bios, short links, and QR codes. The process is often overwhelming and lacks a streamlined workflow.
SOURCES (60)
“For quick site edits, i moved to wix and the autosave tbh saved me a few big headaches. The templates also helped when i needed to revamp sections overnight. If you try their editor, it just feels kind of freeing compared to messing with raw…”
“Sitelo comes with file based routing, data loading, image optimisation, lighthouse audit, search (via pagefind), server islands and more…”
“automad is probably the closest fit, flat-file and lets you add editable blocks without rebuilding everything”
“Mine is less designed by me at this point. I dump everything into Claude connected to Notion and let it lay out the structure, then have it render the contents as an HTML view. The “where does this go” question mostly went away once something else was answering it.”
“You're correct :-) ... but if you forget ... and enter a lot of data and then remember, it's a pain, you have to go page, by page, by page, by page ..... If you work with a lot of databases, it's still a pain (re: templates). Also (just remembered), if you use a clipper, it ignores your template, so you have to fix it, page by page by page. Doing research and clipping references/citations, .... I've used Notion for years and it wasn't that way when I started using it ... alth”
“the wiki part is probably less important than making contributions really easy. a page per person can start feeling like homework fast I’d begin with a private story timeline where someone can add a title, a few photos, the year and who was there. family and trip pages can then be generated from those tags. a monthly email showing what was added will probably help more than a social feed since nobody remembers to check another site I’d also build export and account recovery early since this is t”
“Statamic is my goto flat-file CMS. Their blueprints allow you to make any part of a page editable, and Jack McDade, the creator of Statamic, is active here on the r/statamic subreddit.”
“Rules and regulations say Wednesday people are allowed to share tools, dashboards, and tools that help with selfhosting. So I'd like to start a discussion on what tools have worked for you? Also does anyone know of any tested web crawlers I can use on top of my browser. I'd like to self host one for fully ethical purposes. submitted by /u/Savings_Gap_2632 [link] [comments]”
“WordPress lacks performance and raises security issues, so I disagree with recommending it for complex projects.”
“I mean there are ways to achieve that level of control that you are looking for without most of the abstractions of html and css by just using a canvas element and manually painting it through javascript”
“This seems like a godsend. But also super risky. I would love to know if anyone has used this tool. I'm struggling to any reviews online.”
“WordPress isn't robust, it's not even secure out of the box and the necessary plugins aren't bulletproof (because WP itself is insecure by design). Literally any MVC framework (such as Laravel) or any CMS built on them (OctoberCMS). MVC frameworks exist for any language that can run on a server.”
“Looks a lot better than my first website well i had everything bunched together and the code was a mess lol. But stuff like this is important even when 99% of your code ends up beeing written by ai. Because you know exactly whats possible and can guide the ai towards a more precise goal.”
“Started the opposite way, no-code first, then tried adding custom code later. The editing speed you’re describing is the real win; most people quit not because the idea is bad but because every change feels like work. Which of the four value props won?”
“A few people have asked me about the website/project I’ve been building for my short-term rental, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far. Hopefully it helps someone else who is thinking about doing something similar. I started with a fairly simple idea: instead of relying entirely on Airbnb/Booking.com, I wanted to build my own little operating system for the property. What started as a website gradually became much more than a website. I now have: • A direct booking/enquiry system, whe”
“What are you trying to do? Your role when using these tools is to get very very very clear about what you want before you even start. The hard part is figuring out what you really need to build. Building it is the second part, and the only reason it's that high on the list is because you will always find that you actually didn't know what you were trying to build and you will therefore waste a lot of time and energy building the wrong things.”
When do you actually learn to do things? All these tools for what?
“Hey, before explaining my problem i know that a lot of you guys don't like ai or 'vibe coding' in general and this is why i ask you to not take care of this and be comprehensive. Im doing website creations, especially redesign and im hesitating with two workflows. Untill now i was doing it this way: i search for inspiration on dribble like hero section or landing page, i take the screenshot and ask gemini to extract the content into json to get the maximum of informations on this scr”
“Quick update from a few weeks into building this thing after work. I'm not a developer. The first version of my site was me fighting code I half understood, and every small copy change turned into an hour of breaking things. I was spending my limited evenings on the website instead of on the actual idea. Two weekends ago I gave up and moved the whole thing onto a no code website builder. Rebuilt the landing page, the pricing section, and a simple signup in maybe an afternoon. The re”
“I’ve been working on this part of NearbyCrew for a while and finally got it to a point where I want to put it in front of other builders. The basic idea is pretty simple: You list what you built once. NearbyCrew creates the profile/workspace for it, then our network can surface it when people are actually looking for something relevant, asking for help, running missions, or discovering people/products. I’m trying to get away from the normal directory where you submit something and then basically”
“honestly depends if you need clean code or just something that looks good fast. framer's more polished for client-facing sites but lovable gives you actual code you can hand off to a real dev later neither's gonna save you if the client starts asking for 47 revisions though”
“Hey everyone, I got tired of dealing with complex SQL setups and Google Maps API limits just to display some custom hiking trails and transit lines, so I built my own lightweight alternative using PHP and Leaflet.js. It stores everything in JSON files, so installation is literally just dropping the files onto any cheap shared host. I added bulk GPX/KML import, a route editor with magnetic snapping, and a geolocation feature that auto-fetches city/country data for stations using Nominatim. I set”
“I'd go with "Curated" instead of official, feels less like you're speaking for Cisco and more like you personally vetted it For the community content mess, maybe let users upvote/downvote questions and only pull from ones above a certain threshold for the build your own exam feature. Still won't catch everything but at least the garbage sinks to the bottom Could also add a report button and have a small team (or just you for now) review flagged questions, that way you'r”
“I think ill have to look into Properties more. For now I figured out how nested Tags work and that took care of part of it. In essence I think I was trying to make a database. As to why, just to know how to do it I guess. I just enjoy structuring and organizing data and like to do it in interesting ways.”
“cheapest way to learn it is to open devtools on those three and take the hero apart. most of them aren't one exported asset, they're a stack of positioned divs and svgs with transforms and a few keyframes, which is part of why nothing generates it in a single shot watch the network tab while you're in there. a hero like that arriving as one big lottie or an autoplaying video is a common way to end up as your own lcp problem”
“My problem was I was lacking inspiration for new sites for my personal and professional projects. So I made this for myself first and then released it after... It got some early traction 5k vistors the week of the first post and 1.3k shares on the first Reddit post. I'd like to know what you like and what you don't and make it better and more accessible and useful Please don't hold back, all genuine feedback welcome submitted by /u/BuffaloConscious7919 [link] [comme”
“Hello, currently editing my wedding page, how to I make the design a continuous page instead of the bar option to progress forward, I want it to be one continuous swipe submitted by /u/Dr9jagal [link] [comments]”
“Retroma always brings a smile to my face. Homepages can indeed get unwieldy. I broke up my homepage into "hubs" each with a specific focus. It's help me to see everything within a particular context at a glance.”
“I want to share a move that changed how my whole blog works, because most of us in here are building something and nobody really hands you this part. For years I wrote posts one at a time and just left them there. Each one on its own little island, hoping the right person found the right one. Two months ago I started something different. I took a whole run of posts on one topic and tied them into a single post that walks a reader through all of it, pointing to each of the smaller ones along the”
“okay idk if this replaces wordpress but i find it useful. https://www.prelo.dev/ I found that building dope websites with AI is super easy, but it's impossible to hand them over to clients. And on the other hand it looks quite hard to use AI in wordpress (not an expert, but i helped someone connect wordpress with claude code and it was quite limited). And a 3rd issue, when building web apps with next.js you need all these different services: postgres, s3, vercel, sendgrid. That's impossi”
Thanks for the advice brother I'll dive more into both html and css then start learning JavaScript and react after like you mentioned. Here's the latest changes i made on the design…
“I don't really understand the uses of the # ^ | buttons that it shows me as other ways to link things, and I also can't tell at all if I'm doing this in a way that will work well when it's time to study, put timelines and ideas together, etc. I don't know what happened to my last vault and I haven't used Obsidian in a long time, so this is a new vault started the first day of classes today. These are the beginnings of transcribing my notes from one video. submitted”
“Honestly, I think the problem is that drag-and-drop builders try to hide the complexity, but then expose just enough of it to make simple changes weirdly painful. Once you understand basic CSS, changing a margin or fixing a layout can take 30 seconds instead of hunting through five different settings panels. The sweet spot for me is using the visual editor for structure, then dropping into the actual code when the editor starts fighting you. You don't need to become a frontend dev, but knowi”
“Do they need anything more than a single page? If not a framework isn't needed. Keep it simple.”
“for a uni project you can do this in like a week even if you never touched code before. the whiteboard mindmap thing is basically one big image with clickable areas mapped on top, html has something called image map for that or you could just slice the image into pieces and wrap each piece in a link tag, that's even simpler. css will handle the styling so it looks clean on different screens making it live is actually not that much harder, github pages is free and you just drag your files the”
“I'd start with the pages and content structure first, then build the shared navbar/footer, and only after that focus on styling. It keeps the project much easier to manage as it grows.”
“Well if you’re not gonna take no for an answer then do Astro + Sanity CMS. It sounds like you’re basically creating a blog. https://www.sanity.io/docs/developer-guides/sanity-astro-blog Why Astro? It’s meant for content rich websites and the building process is incredibly simple. Why Sanity? Well, they have a great ecosystem and have tons of resources. And you can build this whole thing yourself with the help of Claude. Also to note: Others have said you’re in over your head which is not wrong.”
“Framer is a good option. Used it for a client when I was doing work for them. It's quite easy to understand and work with.”
“I'm setting up a small independent research and publishing organisation, and I'm trying to build its website completely from scratch. The difficult part is that I'm doing this alone. I don't have a developer, designer, IT person, or technical team that I can call later. I'm also working with a genuinely limited budget, so I can't simply hire an agency and have them figure everything out for me. I've been using ChatGPT and Claude to learn and work through things, and I”
“Thanks for the feedback! I think overall the home page maybe be too much or too many words overall. Simplifying it and focusing would help it a lot.”
Adding the "Link to Page" block helped me - thanks for the suggestion!
“I think this is very relevant. My website isn't live yet so I can't try it for now. I am not sure I would pay for this, but I would certainly take the time to go over your guides.”
“I'm researching link-in-bio tools for indie hackers and creators. I've been talking to people who are frustrated with: Linktree charging 12% on free plan, 9% on $15/mo Pro plan Beacons charging 9% fees until $30/mo plan (plus support complaints) Stan Store costing $29/mo from day one (no free plan) Email automation costing $99/mo extra on most platforms Questions for you: What do you currently use for your bio link? How much do you pay per month? What's your biggest frustration with”
As someone with no experience, what does a “select” mean in web design?
“I’d definitely suggest some testing as someone mentioned, but I’d also suggest mapping out the user flow/journey and making sure the features on the homepage are tied to some type of value for the user. Present the highest-value features on the homepage that show real user value. It’s very easy to get into to feature creep but I would anchor in the core 3-4 actions that solve the users pain points.”
“The sweet spot is probably a site that feels familiar enough to use without thinking, but still has some personality to it. Good type, color, illustrations or a little motion can do a lot without turning the whole page into a showreel. If you land on a site and immediately know where to go, but still remember how it looked afterward, that’s a pretty good balance.”
“Are you looking to create "Copy/View as Markdown" functionality for your website, like here ? You could do something like this: ┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ docusaurus build │ │ (one build, not two) │ └──────────────┬──────────────┘ ┌─────────────┴──────────────┐ ▼ ▼ ┌────────────────────────┐ ┌────────────────────────┐ │ HTML route — │ │ Markdown route — │ │ /page/ → index.html │ │ /page-md/ per page │ └───────────┬────────────┘ └────────────┬───────────┘ │ ▼ │ ┌ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─”
“Thanks. While I can't take credit for the design, I did put a lot of effort in dialing in the front end of the site. Although the backend is pretty robust as it's a WordPress site that is composed entirely of a lot of custom blocks.”
“I was in similar situation with my cousin's photography page. Look into Publii, it's a desktop app where you make the site with blocks and drag stuff around, then it generates static files you just upload to your server. Not exactly like squarespace but works similar and it's free. Another option is WordPress with some page builder plugin but that's overkill for simple portfolio and you need to maintain php and database.”
“I use Launch Site for building mobile-first websites, and it handles hosting and SSL and stuff automatically. It makes it easier to manage everything in one place and keeps my sites looking good on mobile. Would recommend for sure if you're into that.”
Wordpress, old reliable, just dont bloat it with plugins.
“I host a simple static website for a friend that I originally created by just hand typing the html and css for it. The problem is that it's a portfolio website so they constantly want to change the videos and layout of the website while having absolutely zero knowledge of how any of it works. I was wondering if there was some kind of drag and drop creator/editor that could update the website kind of like a selfhosted Squarespace or Google Sites? Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appr”