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.

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

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.

I built it specifically to address shortfalls of other site builders:

- No themes

- Uses 'modules' rather than the strangely popular drag and drop thing with blocks and widgets (which then jumble about the page wildly when resizing). We have 40 modules at the moment and I keep building more.

- 100% mobile optimised. We hide no functionality and most page editing I tend to do side by side, with the CMS in a separate window next to the preview site

- The preview site updates automatically when you hit 'save' so that it can be viewed on many devices in real-time at the same time (and shared easily too)

- It's very fast. No React or other shenanigans. There is JS for the more complex interactions, but it's been applied sparingly. Doesn't work without JS though.

- Sites are deployed to Cloudflare Workers Sites. The SSG behind the scenes is Hugo

I don't advertise this thing anywhere and all my clients are word of mouth. I have yet to hear a single negative thing from anyone.

I live in the countryside so my clients are all pensioners who don't know computers. They've all had run-ins with WordPress and naturally hated it. (though I don't want to knock a properly setup WordPress, IMO you have to be technical to do it and my system is aimed specifically at non technical people)

I don't do shops and even blogs are probably not directly my target audience. But if you just need to make a simple site with pictures, videos and images (maybe a mailchimp signup, instagram gallery or Google calendar signup or showing some PDF newsletters), then I'd challenge you to do it faster in any other system.

I'm doing this on the side, so have no time to build websites, so it takes no time to build websites in my system :) (I've built a lot of websites for free and just end up collecting the hosting charge which is between £8-£13 a month, which is hopefully similar to some sitebuilders, but I can't compete with the £3 per month offerings that tie you into other services and immediately become more expensive as soon as you add any meaningful functionality.)

There are about a billion things I want to improve about it of course. It's certainly not perfect, but finding the time is a challenge. I hope to one day be able to make it my full time job.

I tried replacing localhost with wax.run, but it didn't do anything.

Lastly, considering you are all about marketing and growth, you'll need a landing page that demonstrates this. As in, your landing page needs to be better than most landing pages. While I'm all about minimalism, I found it quite jarring to just land on a page with a half moon on it, which doesn't really do anything.

Some words about who you are would go a long way. There is a "team" link in the navigation and that also doesn't go anywhere (without a login presumably)

Just some pointers. Pm me when we can sign up, because if you are the people who solve marketing for me, that would easily be the biggest revolution in my entrepreneurial journey. I hate marketing so much.

I built a thing that makes static sites, including form handling. BUT, the form handling, inevitably, requires a POST request back to a form-forwarding server that then sends you the enquiry via email (https://pinkpigeon.co.uk). Netlify include form handling for static sites, but it's so pricey that that was one of the main motivators for me to build my own solution.

I am not sure what the best implementation for this would be. Some people may go down the AWS Lambda route or something similar, but that's still just a (albeit highly distributed) server forwarding the request for you.