darrenkidd
commented
3 years ago So, further to the above, I guess how do you see yourself maintaining the site as your business grows? Is it something you'd like to be able to do yourself? Is it something you'd want me or another dev to do? Is it important that you're able to easily add integrations to Shopify or other store solutions or are you going to just redirect users to physical locations or other shopping sites?
I'm very willing to try option 3 above which is a very modern way of building sites. I've used all of those technologies on other occasions, but never combined together in that way, so I'd be treating it as a learning experience also and wouldn't be charging for all of my hours. I guess I'd just like to know a bit more about where you see it all in another 6 months - what's the business plan I guess?
Also w.r.t. contracts/agreements, I'm fine with a "living agreement" in GitHub that states all the important things we've already discussed on Messenger. I feel that fits nicely because I want you to have control over the stream of work in here so you can pick and choose what comes next, if things need doing. I hope that makes some sense!
Hey @christinalamprecht - so we've got something very temporary showing here. Just wanted to get your thoughts on where you want this to live when it's "released" to customers.
(1) Some people host their sites in GitHub - as we are now - because you don't pay for any of the hosting. It's also pretty simple. Downsides are that there's no guarantee on it always being available, and the repository has to be public so people can come and look at the code and our discussions here. It's mainly for hobby sites, not for fashion/shopping businesses.
(2) WordPress is another option - I'm not sure if you'd looked at it. Although I'm not (yet) an expert in customising it, you can do a lot of custom work on top of a base theme that you can purchase, and it's designed for ease-of-use for authors to edit pages themselves etc. No need for a dev. It's also got all the usual integrations with Shopify et al. so you can include those with minimal effort. Downside is that hosting is probably a bit more expensive and you need to be very careful with security; it's a wildly popular platform and thus is the target of many attacks.
(3) Then there's always a very, very custom developed website which can use modern tools backed by GitHub (one of the reasons why I created this repository - so we had this option from the start). It's a bit more effort to get set up, but you can edit things in GitHub, and see what I've been up to. You can add integrations as well but it'll be a bit more development effort I think. One example of a modern "technology stack" I'd aim at is GatsbyJS with maybe something like Contentful added in the future if you need more flexibility.
Options 2 and 3 above both need us to purchase hosting somewhere, but the type of hosting differs depending on which one you like the idea of. We can probably save money by going with free hosting to test it all out until we need to switch it on to real customers.
I think you've been leaning towards option 3 but I wanted to get this out there so you'd had a chance to really think about it. Once I've got a basic layout done I can pretty much replicate that in any of the 3 above.