Joined 5 years ago
Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.
It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)
I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.
This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.
It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).
There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.
Just about at $500 per month in recurring hosting fees.
It's a CMS which publishes static sites to Cloudflare workers sites.
I've not done any marketing, it's all word of mouth and took 3 years to get to this point.
Gonna keep growing it slowly on the side.
They were one of the first businesses to use my CMS for one of their websites, so they hold a special place in my heart :)
Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so.
I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS.
Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly.
At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it.
It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it.
If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot.
Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning.
I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.
Built with my own site-builder and advertising my own site-builder!
Turns out nobody registers for a free account or just signs up. All my business comes from building websites for people and word of mouth.
I optimised the thing for speed of building websites above all else, which helps, seeing as I'm a one-person operation.
It has been working perfectly for about a year by now.
We don't use CF pages, admittedly. It's workers sites, due to the ability to publish directly.
DeviantArt was the first place where I shared photography, a very, very long time ago. My account still works, funnily enough. It was a great place that reminds me of the MySpace / wild west days of the earlier internet.
Good memories.
Until there is a bullet proof way of creating virtual displays, Deskreen isn't of much use to someone with my use case. Which is a damn shame. I really wanted to use an iPad as 2nd screen.
More often than not it comes down to the horrifyingly confusing documentation, inconsistent UX, hilarious over-promising the world + dog on landing pages, etc.
Also, exfiltrating a website from Wix (changing the nameservers, which should take two seconds, like it does with any other hoster) is a huge ordeal. They make it very difficult.
