June 5, 2023
Web pages are perhaps the best way that we have found to share information: You can read them with almost any device from almost anywhere on the planet. They update instantly, without wasting any paper. They have interactivity and multimedia that make them the easiest way to do anything from buying an airline ticket to watching a movie. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can make one.
Part of what helped make the web so successful was the fact that its core technologies are pretty easy to understand. Even before the web hit the mainstream in the 1990s, there were already uncountable pages dedicated to all types of human endeavors. Web 1.0 had it’s flaws, but it was a very exciting and free place, full of homespun pages very clearly created by everyday people with a simple desire to share information.
Now, decades later, we’ve become disconnected from the ability to build our own pages from scratch. Our sites have become much better, but they’ve also become much, much more complicated and understanding them is out of reach for even most nerds.
These days, most people use pretty complex software to build sites, either a blogging platform like WordPress or a graphical subscription product like Squarespace or Wix. These tools are great at what they do, but they tend to shape the content that they publish in some unfortunate ways. They save time at the price of quality.
The blogging tools tend to create sites full of pages that all look the same. Instead of editing a web page, you edit text that gets inserted into a template, making dozens or hundreds of look-alike pages. On the no-code website builders, people often pick an off-the-shelf template that lacks coherence with their content. Small businesses love these tools but they typically fail to create an online customer experience that matches their physical products or advertising.
The irony is that web pages have never been this awesome. Video, animation, vector graphics, variable fonts, even 3D — now we’ve finally got all the fun stuff. Web pages really shine when they use all the advantages of the medium to lift their content to the next level, the combination of great typography, graphics, tasteful animation, video, audio and interactive elements.
When I see something that nails all of that, I’m usually blown away. In general, the web as a medium is woefully underused, whether it’s for news, marketing, blogging, education, commerce or whatever else.
My colleagues and I want to see more amazing web pages. That’s why we built a page editor where you can do everything the web can do. It has all the power of writing code, only just a bit easier to manage.
Obviously, not every page needs to have a killer design or interactivity, but if that’s your goal, our editor could help you achieve it. Hot Page has a unique approach to building websites. In fact, that’s the only reason I thought it was worth my time to create it — it’s something I wanted for myself and couldn’t find anywhere.
Surely you’ve heard of HTML, the fundamental language of the
web that turns plain text into links and headings with tags like
<a> and <h1>. It’s at once very easy
to understand and write, and at the same time, a goddamned pain in the
ass. You have to write closing tags (</a> and
</h1>) and they have to match up with their opening
tags or all hell will break loose. Even writing a quotation mark the
correct way requires you to remember a fancy escape sequence. And most
people who still write HTML do so in a code editor, using a fixed-width
font that looks like it could have come out of a typewriter.
Hot Page surfaces the “good parts” of web technologies as they already exist — and smooths out the sharp corners on the rest of it with a better user interface. On Hot Page, you edit real HTML. You’re not building your website using an abstraction of a web page as you would in a visual editor — you’re creating the same stuff that your browser uses to read and display pages.
Hot Page is just getting started. The web platform has grown to become something really quite complex and we’ve only begun build the functionality we need to make it easier. Our roadmap is full of amazing stuff: visual tools that will help you write great CSS, an editor that will let you drag and drop code snippets, and web components that let you easily re-use functionality built in JavaScript. It’s going to be a fun ride—so please signup and stick around!