Squarespace is like $20/mo for a basic site promoting your Brick and Mortar business. That includes domain, hosting, and a template/CMS. It's not that pricey.

Have you looked at micro.blog? Plans start at $1 per month.

Google Sites exists. Buy a domain, point it at a free Google site. So easy a religion major can make a site that looks pretty decent (ha ha, only serious; I thought he'd used Wordpress at first) for just the cost of domain registration.

Frontmatter CMS is a VSCodium plugin that works as a somewhat user-friendly CMS for the likes of Hugo. https://frontmatter.codes/

I set it up for my brother to run his static blog, and it's quite good if you like that kind of thing. There are some quirks where it gets confused if you rename mycoolarticle.md, so I still prefer using notepad++ and git and CLI for mine.

That’s what I’ve been working on for the last few years: https://palacms.com (MIT) Not ready to announce the V3 RC yet (need to fill out the starter sites) but it’s working well if you wanna give it a spin - runs & deploys on Railway’s free tier.

I've updated, this now has Zero Runtime js, Not a single line of js runs when this page loads in your browser.

There are at least a few CMS editors for static sites intended for non-technical/less-technical users. They often still require someone technical to setup (config files and OAuth connections to GitHub, for example) but then provide an experience somewhat like what one would expect from the WordPress Admin Page.

Two examples I've briefly worked with:

Decap CMS (formerly Netlify CMS): https://decapcms.org/

Lume CMS: https://lume.land/cms/

Honestly, there are some easier ways out there now, although of course no solution is perfect.

For non-technical people I'd recommend the Hostinger Website Builder, Obsidian Quartz or Astro Starlight.

Although as a front-end dev I'd choose building a custom page with Astro, which has now become much easier though with good templates available + LLM assistance.

I wrote a comparison of less-technical ways to build a website here with more details: https://webdev.bryanhogan.com/start/ways-to-build/

I'm getting NXDOMAIN, and various online resolution tools [0] show the same.

[0] https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3alocalcafe.or...

ah yeah, sorry work in progress. There is a link to the repo https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite

nope, been there as an entrepreneur where you have NO available funds when the Squarespace renewal hits.

It's a lot.

It's not pricey if you are a serious business making good money. It's a huge price if you are say a part time artist just wanting somewhere to store a price list, gallery and contact form.

I'm just surprised there is nothing that fills the gap between github pages and a full hosted solution with a ton of junk you don't need. All it really needs is maybe a locally running app that can handle generating the static pages and uploading them for you.

A webapp or gui WYSIWYG static generator with basic git support abstracted away would go far for many. Just let it push to some private repo which cloudflare pages or similar would deploy off of.

It really feels like the only part of a non-static site most want is an editor. I absolutely loathe the matter but I do see why some restaurants only maintain a facebook page for their online presence.

> I'm just surprised we haven't seem some app that can act like a wordpress admin page but generating a static output you can host for free or very cheap somewhere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44391535

(I'm not affiliated with it)

Why not both? If you're deciding where to go for lunch, it's very useful to have the menu online

There is some code for looking up the geo lat/log of locations at compile. not sure how you would do that. But yeah outside of that your are mostly correct.

I used elixir because thats what I know and love so it was mostly just a personal choice rather than a technical one.

First: https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite/blob/main/LICEN...

Second: pixabay

Third: Yeah that's the challenge I'm working on at the moment. Thanks for the feed back.

I do plan on cleaning up the repo so that you are not starting with the example and also plan on making a small tutorial video to show how much effort it takes to setup.

What an exhausting solution to a made-up problem. This is exactly the kind of functionality JS was made to provide. There's a lot more JS in the PDF.js renderer modern browsers, and if you're not using a modern browser it likely wouldn't render at all. As others have pointed out, you're asking restaurants to throw away mobile traffic, screen readers, anyone not on a mainstream desktop browser to save ~20 lines of code in a programming language you don't like.

A PDF can't get the user halfway through the delivery process before seeing the soups.

this is my biggest issue. if i think about my sister who is running a small patissery, she has issues even with a laptop. she lives almost entirely on her phone. so either the documentation has to be come a whole lot better. Wordpress was started this way.

They are markdown files, if you can't manage a markdown file then you are not likely gonna have any easier of a time working in wordpress or anything for that matter.

We assume people are so stupid, its not they are stupid, they have to learn wordpress admin, square space's admin, wixx, they all have a learning curve. The issue is time and effort. If the process is simple even if not elegant its still simple.

In my case you are logging into github and navigating to a folder vs an admin and navigating to a specific section. Editing file directly in github vs hitting save on some form and site deploys via github actions without any other need. If anything my system offers version control baked in with about the same level of effort.

I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.

The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.

No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.

PDF:s are not great on mobile. And you can’t easily translate them (I often translate restaurant menus when they are on a website with just 2 clicks)

I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...

To be fair this project uses zero 3rd party npm modules for runtime. The total runtime JS it uses is 1.76kB in size.

Remember during Covid where every restaurant's menu was a QR code on the table that linked to a PDF in S3?

PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.

It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.

Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.

If you can't afford $20 per month, you are not in business.

Not exactly what you’re asking for, but this is nonetheless an interesting approach: https://getpublii.com/

Macs used to come with iWeb. https://www.apple.com/welcomescreen/ilife/iweb-3/

These days you can buy paid software to do this:

- $110 https://blocsapp.com

- $90 https://realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver-classic/

- $80 https://sitely.app

- $30 https://bootstrapstudio.io

- $0 https://www.silex.me

- $0 https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

- $0 until recently, https://web.archive.org/web/20240410200646/https://grapesjs....

RapidWeaver Classic calls itself a subscription and sets up autopay, but you can immediately cancel and keep that version forever, like Jetbrains.

Let's be honest -- at that point you don't have a business anymore and aren't an "entrepreneur".

The barrier to create a website using Astro + a Template + telling an LLM like Gemini what you want is very low nowadays. So still, if you work with code some technical knowledge is required, but it will only get easier, probably.

Because they can make one nice pdf formatted to get printed out in the restaurant and then reuse it to display on the website

The complexity between the modern web and a pdf is marginal. PDFs do get printed for menus. Editing a PDF and uploading it to the site, integrating prices and syncing between the site, online ordering, PDF menus is just part of the business. There are lots of platforms that help with this such as Slice.

If the restaurant doesn't have anything besides a menu, /index.pdf is fine—no web design required; reuse the menu they're printing anyway.

The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.

Nobody should need 60 million lines of code (Linux Kernel 30M + Chromium 30M) to render some text and images ;)

Translating anything that renders on my screen is the same two clicks to open an LLM with the screen contents. I expect that will become an increasingly universal experience as LLM features get shoved into every nook and cranny of tech.

I vastly prefer looking at a PDF menu over an HTML one nearly all the time. PDFs are usually nicely formatted, and I don’t mind zooming and panning to see everything. HTML is frequently terribly formatted, interspersed with ads, slow, etc

I love Astro; there is so much you can do with it.

This is what Netlify does. Hook up a private repo and deploy. Make a commit and it auto builds and you have a CI/CD pipeline. This is what I build all of my static sites with. You can do almost any JS framework like React, Angular, Vue, etc.

Netlify does way more than this, but it makes hosting static stuff super easy.

https://www.netlify.com/

All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol

Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.

> People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology

Wait for 2 more iOS redesigns and everyone will use assistive technology on Apple devices :)

Remember how after Covid that didn't go away in tons of places

iWeb was an utter monstrosity. Worse than MS Front Page, which I didn't think was possible.

Let's be more honest: if the power is on, the sheriff isn't locking your doors, but customers can't reach your web presence, the problem isn't really "the entrepreneur".

Some don't even bother, and the only thing they update (when they remember about it) is their business hours on Google Maps.

It also works just fine without JavaScript, so I'm not sure what they're trying to do with that comment.

I was going to recommend the same! Astro + Astro theme + an LLM will get you very far these days.

Covid ended?

There is very little chance a non developer would make it through that. The current options are Instagram/Facebook page which is free and easy. Or a website which is either expensive or requires you to be a developer.

index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers and also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks, so it's a minor inconvenience for some, and straight up unusable for others

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

With a website you don’t need to switch an LLM. You just press translate.

There's been a translate button for years which hooks deep into every nook and cranny of the website's HTML. It works great, it's built in and many restaurants even advertise it for tourists, because it's a zero-effort translation of their existing menu. Plus, it's low-data when you're inside a 1-bar basement restaurant.

Using an LLM to translate the visible part of a PDF on a mobile... seems like the worst possible solution to the problem.

Translating PDFs is more complicated than that because the strcture of a PDF document doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing.

For example: if there's a dish name with a 2 line description below it and some allergy symbols below that, in HTML you can imagine the document structure that produces that. In PDF terms that might be 4 separate objects and, in particular, the eyes can see the two lines are adjacent so they fit together but the document structure doesn't really represent it taht way, necessarily.

This might also not work with translation because the lines are set for the size of the text they contain. Same for resizing the font.

Put another waay, PDF should be viewed as a typeset and layout format, not a document format.

> HTML is frequently terribly formatted, interspersed with ads, slow, etc

You can put ads into terribly formatted PDFs too

I used to be all in on Jekyll. Now all I use is Astro + Tailwind + Claude, and it’s magic. No need for a theme with this combination.

What about tools like lovable/base44 etc?

I'm a developer (so I prefer Astro and all) but was thinking of the barrier of entry for creating new websites is very low now.

But you can easily serve a desktop version or a small screen version.

No, the comment correctly points out that the "Soup" button (and all of its siblings... the food categories) is inoperable when JavaScript is disabled. You're stuck with "All" instead of nice filtering. There are ways to achieve this without JavaScript.

> index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers

The horrible Wix sites most restaurants end up using are likely less accessible than a PDF. The Adobe PDF reader can reflow text.

> also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks

The average wysiwyg site builder produces bundles that are an order of magnitude larger than a PDF menu. Also, the PDF is easier to cache correctly and can be easily saved for offline access.

640K is enough to read a menu.

I bet that's part of the reason why microcontrollers, embedded programming, and retro computing are all popular hobbies these days. A return to a simpler time, when programs are compiled to a few kilobytes and run as fast as the hardware allows. Graphics? Unicode? Who needs 'em, just a stream of ASCII and integers for me thanks.

It's the worst solution, apart from the fact it works better than all the other solutions.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm describing. It's getting a screenshot of the visible portion of the rendered document, not the document itself with all the tags and nastiness inside. The same feature works with a photo of handwritten text, where obviously no digital document exists. It's not perfect, but usually adequate for menu translation.

Yes, and you can strap jet engines onto horses at the race track.

No one does either of those, IRL.

In theory, yes, but the parent comment is talking about what they've frequently encountered in practice. Maybe there's reason to expect that having a lot more PDFs of menus might not result in a similar experience, but it doesn't seem obvious to me at least

Why is Wix horrible...or why does it create horrible sites by default?

Curious, I haven't tried it.

ah, gotcha. that would be nice, but tbh it seems rather minor? anyone who knows how to disable javascript (an extremely-clear "power user" signal) can probably be expected to know how to search a page too.

I'm waiting for restaurants I can telnet into to get the menu (because SSH is too heavy).

Unicode is a must in a human facing application, even in those countries where English is spoken by the majority of people.

It's just peculiar especially since the repo readme [0] specifically says "Minimal JavaScript - Only when truly needed" and yet it's used for this food category filtering, a feature for which JS is certainly not truly needed.

[0] https://github.com/Local-Cafe/localcafe-lite?tab=readme-ov-f...