What do you guys use to actually put your websites together?
The company I work for uses Wordpress, which I struggle with. (Thanks Kevin for the very timely podcast episode, which I'm in the process of devouring!) So once we've all become CSS geniuses, what are people using to build your websites? VSCode and FTP'ing it to a server? Astro (intriguing!!)? A headless CMS? Headless Wordpress? Just looking for some ideas - I've been creating some great landing page ideas but it's super hard to put those designs into our company's existing Wordpress sites (one has a custom theme and the other uses Bricks). I guess I'm asking more than one question here - just looking for people's thoughts I guess!
23 Replies
If there's a lot of dynamic content you'll probably want some SSR going on.
-# Server-side render
If it's a mostly static pages with very little updates than SSG is a really good option as you don't need to put together the page on each HTTP call.
-# Static site generation
A CMS is useful in keeping things together in one place and not worrying about people futzing with code, like if you have a sales team that needs to update copy on the latest offerings of the company.
Also, in 2025 you shouldn't be using straight FTP. Well, not without git in there somewhere to keep a history of the changes
even then, it's better to do
git pull or git clone instead of ftpYeah, either setup a local git repo on the server and pull or have some CICD pipeline to push it to the server
Is it because ftp is basically copying a set of files and human error can miss some.
And git clone/pull generally being easier setup
I haven't used ftp before
no, sometimes ftp isn't even an option, like in private repos
for automatic deployments, that is
FTP is yet another tool with yet another setup you need to do. Whereas git does it all for you while keeping a record of what's come before
and you need the server software running
with an user
and it has firewall issues sometimes
also, quite often, you want to run things to deploy where the outcome might be based on the environment it's run in
so you can't use your local machine to build a version of your site that'll work on your server
Sorry what do you mean by "run things to deploy "
your build might use local environment variables for example
If there's more than just "copy files to server". Like a build step
you might need to run db migrations too
you also may need to re-create a .env file for staging and/or production
also, setting up an ftp server is annoying
and! A lot of devs don't actually have direct access to their deployment servers because sysadmins are stingy bastards. Set up your deploy pipeline, push to the right branch, and the rest is automatic
also, the target server may change, because of docker
or each deployment totally destroys the docker and re-builds it from scratch
Ah gotcha
Thanks all for responses so far! I'm curious about:
- does anyone have a good course to recommend on how to use Git? The version control is confusing and when I tried it a couple years ago I actually got tripped up.
- also, in terms of what you're using to BUILD the sites -- VSCode? Astro? Wordpress? Other CMS's?
anything with "git in 5 minutes" should be enough for you
The book on git's website was pretty decent from what I remember
Depends on hoe you learn best - there are tons of resources!
If youre a visual/audio learner, NetNinja recently published a video course Git Crash Course and i really grasp his teaching style. But everyone is different.
There is a React course that is always recommended and raved about but something about the frequency of the instructors voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me. No clue why but it makes me physically uncomfortable. Nothing to do with the quality of the content.
So just gotta identify how you learn best then give a few resources a try!
YouTube
Git Crash Course
It depends of the kind of website you want to make. I recently used Grav CMS and it was a nice change. I'm a Drupal senior dev and I was looking for something new and lighter for websites who have editing needs but not a lot.
Grav CMS
Grav - A Modern Flat-File CMS | Grav CMS
Grav is a Modern, Crazy Fast, Ridiculously Easy and Amazingly Powerful Flat-File CMS.
Usually some flavor of a CMS / website builder. I've been using Webflow recently. Doesn't really scratch the dev issue though. I'm messing around with Statamic in my free time to see if it's a better alternative
We are working with OctoberCMS, bootstrap and gitlab