Hot Page – a graphical site builder

Hey, I'm Tim and I created Hot Page. This is a long-time side project that I'm now bootstrapping with the help of a couple of friends. The idea is to take the convenience of a drag-and-drop editor (Squarespace, Wix, etc), but never lose the connection to the basic building blocks of web pages: HTML elements, CSS rules, etc. The advent of Web Components makes this a really powerful model.

Although I'm of course pleasantly surprised to see this on the front page of HN, I was planning on waiting a few months to post it myself because we are working on some ways to make the editor much more powerful. We have a long roadmap of new features like:

* more ways to edit CSS properties visually (without losing the 1:1 connection to the CSS generated)

* inline CSS (style attribute) editor for elements that let's you use :hover and media queries

* a library of code "snippets" that lives in the left panel along side the basic elements

* tighter integration with web components

* integrating VS code language servers for accurate auto completion everywhere

* and a whole lot more.

I'm a long time lurker on HN and have long loved the community here. All of your thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated, especially on our marketing because that is proving to be a real challenge. AMA

edit: roadmap

While checking this out I came across this site (https://alice.hot.page/) in its showcase as one of the examples and legit spent five minutes reading Alice in Wonderland and I think I need to introspect how I spend my time a little..

Looks quite nice! Oddly enough, it transported me back nearly 20 years to my student days. I didn't have the money to buy domain names but I wanted to set up a few websites on the World Wide Web!

My search for free hosting led me to Geocities. However, websites there were hosted under paths like geocities.com/foo, rather than the subdomain format I wanted (foo.geocities.com).

Eventually, I discovered 20m.com, which as the name indicates, offered 20 MB of free hosting space. The best part was that it allowed me to publish my website under a subdomain.

Remarkably, one of the sites I created back then is still up and running: http://encoders.20m.com/ (Please don't judge the content though. I was young, naive and I was just messing with the Web!)

Love the aesthetic they're using here. Reminds me of another project in this same vein https://mmm.page/

Inspired by Hotglue[1], the opensource content manipulation system thats also self-hostable (duh)?

[1]https://hotglue.me/

I’m glad the weird-flashy trend is back. We’ve been on the clean/flat design land for too long.

Even if we’re more self ware now and a bit a cynicism and self-deprecation is inevitable, but that’s postmodernism for you.

Love the design and your way of communicating!! You just made me a fan of you and your product.

My personal flow to love your product was: 1. I was intrigued to click this HN due to an initial feeling of the product must be more interesting than the HN title due to all the attention, so let’s check it out. 2. Once on the site I was feeling “finally someone who dares not having consensus driven design”. So please keep on daring!! 3. I thought “I know people who would love this design”. 4. Being a person often being asked to build friends’ sites and way to often having to say no due to: the time it takes, the inflexibility and the price for running with your own domain being annoyingly high for a small business, I started looking for answers on your landing page. You seem to be offering just that! As a dev I can do things quick, that look good and don’t cost a lot. 5. I started reading the this HN thread and was amazed by how genuine and down to earth you seem.

All in all you just got a big fan in me. I’ll try out the prodigy, have patience with its imperfections and if you keep on communicating with the people signing up in a similar fashion to this HN thread, I think you’ll have a big amount to fans eager to push you and your product forward.

Thanks so much or the early Saturday morning flashback to my Geocities page. Can you add a spinning “under construction” sign, those were my favorites.

The pricing, bandwidth 5GB for $9 a month? This sounds unreasonably high

I don't know if it's fair to say here that I don't like the name personally, and I think women would hesitate before putting their name in a subdomain.

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but I can't load the editor anymore for this site I was getting started on just to see how it works: https://hotpage.dev/corytheboyd

Get the "Wamp wamp An error has occured: Internal Server Error" popup.

Love this idea, and the execution, so much though <3

Really cool! Love the demo option to try it out instead of just signing up.

The email verification email itself does not show up properly in Fastmail for some reason. I had to switch to the text only view to get the actual link...

Very cute and congrats. The pricing is so high for what you are providing though. For a niche stuff like this maybe $1-2 max would be okay. WordPress is free, droplets are $2-5 with 20gb diskspace + 2TB bandwidth these days (with cpanel). I hope you can make money.

Nice work.

The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.

I hope there will be an editor like Gutenberg for webcomponents. With the possibility to define all kinds of constraints (what components are allowed as subelements and so on)

The landing page looks really nice!

How does one create web pages like this without using a tool like the above? Would animating html elements with javascript be sufficient?

Great nostalgic design. You’ve built something nice here.

Looks cool. If any staff are here, your discord server button in the footer has a bad URL (to a channel not a server). Got an invite code?

i’ve been looking for something just like this to make my website. I’m a graphic designer with light coding experience and this looks perfect. I would love to see a way to self host this as that is the only thing holding me back from using it.

I’m starting to see this new aesthetic pop up. Anyone know how to define it, or where/why it came from?

Very cool!

> Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap

Made me chuckle

I am also a Tim and this is great. Geocities for Adults.

i'm truly obsessed with this design. who was the person that designed it?

Strange but lovely design

Love the comic design!

The creator’s Twitter looks sketchy - a couple months old, handful of ChatGPT posts, then this.

Where’s the AI? Feels like an obvious add-on for something like this. :)