I'm a dev and know how to build and deploy a website, but I have some friends that ask me how to or if I'm available to do it, and this is still a very crafty thing to do, at least if you want to make it for free. Sometimes, I want to help, but if you have some years programming, you know there are a lot more interesting things to learn rather than building a portfolio website. Also, I wish they could have the freedom to do it themselves.
Maybe my friends are too stingy that don't want to pay for it, having all their social profiles for free.
You might say I should associate my friend's credit card to a server hosting and deploy some Wordpress instance with Cloudflare cache on front. However, I find myself making a website from scratch, trying out Astro, writing HTML, JS, a bulk of Tailwind classes, and exposing some fields in DecapCMS so that my friend can tweak some parts without pinging me. The site is git-hosted and gets statically built and deployed in Vercel/Netlify/whatever.
Despite I'm experienced, it takes a lot of time! and customization is limited. I think that website builders should be as accesible as social media platforms these days. I guess Tumblr used to provide that experience, it had themes, a HTML template editor for your posts, and even let you connect your own domain.
I'd separate hosting from builder. Hosting is cheap and free, the problem seems to be the builder/CMS, which doesn't even need to be a cloud service. What alternatives are out there? What do you think good old Frontpage/Dreamweaver users?
