One other thing: There's a reason Troubleshooters.Com isn't a Drupal
site or a
Wordpress site or a Rails site or a Zope site. The minute a database
becomes
involved, both deployment and backup become much, much more difficult.
How do you create content and how do you maintain it ie, modify your
content?
The answer I'm about to give is for web pages without frequent (weekly through every second) changes. If you're making a shopping cart, blog, or social media site of course you need a database. That being said...
I make my web pages in VSCode, which is a zen-coding editor. Please do a web search on zen-coding because zen-coding is the key to high productivity when writing HTML. I do it right on my computer. My HTML5 is written to be well formed XML so I can easily test with a Python XML parser and to make debugging easier. Nowadays, after it passes the XML test, I put it
The directory/file hierarchy on my computer hard disk is the same as the one online: I simply use sftp to transfer files. To transfer an entire site (perhaps your old web host went bad and you're moving to a new one), you have many choices. Here are two:
* Rsync the whole directory system
* Make a .tgz on your computer, sftp it up to your web host, ssh in to your web host, and untar.
This isn't my first rodeo, so I know my suggestion will be greeted with howls of indignation:
1) HTML is soooooo 1996!
2) My time's too valuable to code HTML!
3) I'm not a programmer! (usually spoken with a hint of pride)
4) I don't know HTML and CSS!
5) You should use Bootstrap instead!
Here's the truth about those assertions:
1) This is a logical falacy called "Appeal to novelty", described at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_novelty . New things can be good, and new things can be bad, so the choice must be made using other criteria. Note also that "Appeal to novelty" is typically hyped by those who want to reach into your pocketbook, whether it's a kitchen remodeller or car salesman wanting you to replace your perfectly functional kitchen or car, or whether it's a middleman like Wordpress.Com wanting to insert themselves in the middle of your STATIC content. Also, HTML is much better now than years ago, CSS is a work of art, and we have zen-coding editors now to double our productivity.
2) Wait til you see how much time you need to spend when your web host goes bad, and you know that happens every few years. But if time is really the issue, go ahead and write your static content in Markdown or Asciidoc and convert it. You still have the source document, no database necessary.
3) HTML and CSS aren't programming. They're just a grammar, and a pretty easy to learn grammar.
4) With zen-coding editors, HTML is much easier to start using, and much quicker to learn. It's really not much of a challenge. CSS is dead bang simple.
5) I can't argue to hard about this: Bootstrap is a good product that can produce good web pages in the hands of a skilled practitioner. The reasons I personally don't use Bootstrap is it adds over 100K of download to each page, it's harder to learn and deal with than HTML and CSS, and if you look at Bootstrap pages in the wild, most don't pass HTML validation, which means they'll render differently on different browsers.
Bottom line: Direct HTML editing is MUCH easier and faster than everyone thinks, and it yields web pages that look how you want on every competent browser.
Once again, if you actually need data from users, by all means use a database. But for information-only pages, HTML/CSS is the better choice. If a page needs automation not requiring permanent storage of data, why not do the automation in Javascript?
SteveT