Well, this is my first time doing something like this… Not the first time building something but definitely the first time doing it while trying to document everything with articles.

This idea goes way back to the time when I was just a web designer (in case you are wondering, yes, I am THAT old) and building websites was the way to pay my bills. I remember building the website was always the easy part but then you had to take care of hosting, database, keeping plugins updated, solving issues with database or php versions, and so on. Looking back to these problems right now makes me laugh but I remember very clearly of how big of a problem were back then.

So when, the people I’m working with right now, came to me with this idea to build a platform to allow people to painlessly make websites and deploy them on the cloud as static websites I was all-in.

As of now you are probably thinking “Hey wake up there are tons of services that allow you to do so, you are about some decades late on the market”, well this was obviously my first thought but we had the goal to make it incredibly easy without asking our costumers to learn a completely new tool. This was our cornerstone, we wanted to build something that our customers could be productive with from the first day.

So we began to scout the idea that our base product had to be a WordPress. I’m aware of what most of you people think about WordPress but almost anyone knows the basics to build a website with it, most important our ideal customer isn’t a newbie, they are advanced users who already know WordPress and are familiar with it and they are also familiar with HTML/CSS/JS.

The next stride was to incorporate a builder, as obviously, Gutenberg wouldn’t suffice for creating a visually stunning landing page. The market is flooded with products, yet most restrict access to the “raw” code. After testing many, I found this to be the most challenging part of our journey so far. From a developer’s perspective, most builders were subpar, often dictating the how and the why, not to mention the poor HTML output affecting SEO, an aspect we are keen on optimizing given our in-house SEO expertise.

Our persistence led us to LiveCanvas, a scarcely promoted yet impressive editor. Its user-centric design coupled with the flexibility to switch between UI and raw HTML was precisely what we were seeking.

We got in contact with the team behind LiveCanvas and found a deal to integrate their product into ours with a partnership that will also allow us to customize this plugin to better fit our needs.

As it stands, we have a customized WordPress version enabling our customers to create new sites, manage content through wp-admin, beautify content using LiveCanvas, and save seamlessly. On the product dashboard, we are devising logic to render websites static on our network before deploying them as static sites on the cloud. To achieve this, we are developing an external API for asynchronous deployment on various cloud platforms. Currently, we have functional code for deployment on Amazon S3, Azure, and DigitalOcean, with plans to integrate more platforms like bunny.net, contabo, wasabi, and traditional FTP.

While I’m withholding the name to avoid jinxing our venture, I’m thrilled to share the first draft of our homepage and am eager to hear your thoughts!