>Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher.

When I was evaluating user friendly web platforms for several non-profits, I ended up choosing Wix over Squarespace because Squarespace didn't provide backup>restore functionality. That's a pretty low bar...

Just because they didn't prioritize a feature that most of their users won't care about doesn't mean its a low bar, it just means you care about something they don't.

Backup/restore tends too look less important until it isn’t. ;)

All of the existing WYSIWYG site builders are walled garden garbage.

As someone who was responsible for setting up brochureware sites that non technical users needed to be able to edit, these site builders were the only option I could find. Taking over a shitty WP site that was built with a hodgepodge of plugins (that were mostly dead) was a nightmare and a different flavor of walled garden.

I went with Wix, as it was the best of the builders, but it is still totally crap. I do not understand why web tech has moved so slowly in this area.

What’s the best option if you’re a non-tech-savvy small business owner, you need a web presence, and you can’t afford to hire someone to do it for you?

If you can't hire someone overseas to make a website, probably run your business off a facebook/instagram page. A lot of small businesses around me do that.

If you're going to answer their question then why not suggest a solution that results in a website one controls, instead of some very basic "use facebook" suggestion. Facebook and other social media for a business are all good ideas, because as a business, eyeballs is what you want and that means putting up your presence wherever they're found in a way that's relevant to you.

However, any self respecting business owner planning for a stable long-term presence should absolutely also have their own website, and have it made to be as independent, simple and easy to maintain as possible in the context of its technical needs.

And how does one do that if one has neither web development skills nor a budget to hire a dev? What WYSIWYG tool would you use? All of the simple static site tools I know of require at least HTML and CSS knowledge.

I honestly don't quite know, but i'm going to research this more carefully and comment back, because it's something I need too, especially if I can keep my site easy but at the same time outside the clutches of some walled garden platform of total service, and total underlying control.

Isn’t that still walled-garden garbage, just without the WYSIWYG part?

I hate this response! Businesses that rely on shitty facebook crap don’t get my business. And hiring someone to make a brochureware website is a maintenance nightmare. Do you work with small businesses much?

I'm not advocating for it, I'm just saying what people in my community do.

Many of the best (and successful) restaurants near me don't have websites, for example.

In some places people run their businesses almost entirely through chat apps like whatsapp or wechat. Works great for businesses based around client relationships.

What??? It is trivially easy to mess up a website in a builder like this. I am reasonably technical and I have to restore many times when making structural edits.

> Companies like Squarespace set the bar much higher. Wix has always been a nightmare to use and customize.

Funny - with a non-profit I help out I was so frustrated with our Squarespace site that I ended up replacing it with a custom site I vibe-knocked out in less than a day.

Better design, faster performance, integrated into mailchimp and volunteer backend, better donation flow also integrated, custom page type templates, better cms (sanity), hosted for free now etc. etc.

Having a semi-decent developer crack open Cursor / Claude Code and spend a day just building _really_ is a threat to all of the hosted website and CMS providers. I'd definitely include Wordpress in that too.

This isn't a good analysis of the value here.

My dad has a Shopify site. He'll sometimes accidentally break his theme by making simple modifications in the editor, and it's not obvious why. Maybe a missing quotation mark or a wrongly nested closing tag. He usually had to revert it or even ask for help.

99% of the things he wants to change about his Shopify site would be better done by asking an LLM to change the template for him.

Frankly, I don't want to be editing HTML by hand to make simple edits, either. I just get Cursor or Claude to do it. If I were using a platform like Shopify or Wix where I don't have the templates sitting in my filesystem, I'd like an LLM integration there too.

Almost all of us have an LLM integrated into our code editor, yet when people want to integrate an LLM into the workflows of non-software-devs, suddenly there's cynicism.

> I think the implication here is that the Wix platform sets the bar so low, that even a vibing LLM can surpass it.

I'm not implying anything! Wix is clearly actively designed to be that way.