About StaticPage
As it sounds StaticPage is a static page creator (builder if you must) for making Coming Soon, Maintenance, and 404-page templates which can be downloaded and used on your own server or website.
…and this is how it’s all started, one clear morning the idea just came to me! Not really… After working in the Web industry for 9 years in various positions surrounding the FrontEnd field, it made sense to try and make this field a bit better by chasing an old dream of making a page creator. A year later and I am still trying to figure out how the world of business and making a product works. Below are the chapters of the past year and the plans for the next one.
Design
The idea of StaticPage and page creator, in general, have been in my head for a couple of years, so my instincts were to puke the idea with a pen over a notebook for starters and afterward port it to the sketch app. See what the people around me thought of the idea.
StaticPage - Page
StaticPage - Panels
As you can see up top the design looks similar to the WordPress dashboard. This is because I have borrowed a lot of inspiration from their design, with that in mind the people who saw this sketch had an easy time relating to the design and making sense of it.
Shopping for Domain Names
My naming process is all about associations. So as making a page creator product I thought the word “Page” should be part of the name but couldn’t be the only part because all the cool “Page” word domain extensions are taken so the search continued for a companion word. Luckily a new trend of building static websites on serverless clouds is becoming a thing and there are still good domain extensions left for the phrase “StaticPage” (please don’t tell the trolls).
Until now I have bought 3 domain names:
staticpages.info- The first one, I was thinking in plural terms.staticpage.info- With the first version out to the world a bought the singular version of the domain name.staticpage.io- Bought this one after I was certain the product can become something.
Version 1 and 2
First time trying to code a POC, did some basic frontend concepts and left it aside for a while. In hindsight, it wasn’t the best time to start code, as being a newlywed on our honeymoon.
The second time was a much easier start, after writing most of the frontend code I began writing the backend code and turned to a friend for help writing the backend code. He agreed to help with one condition, rewrite the backend code in another coding language (from Laravel, PHP to Flask, Python). At the time it sounded cool because I always wanted to learn that code language and this was the chance. Two weeks after finishing the rewrite my friend lost interest in the project and I was left with a backend code which I knew little to none how to read or write. The next week I spent learning to code in that language.
Releases
After a month of coding, the first version of StaticPage came to life. I was so excited (!!!) and showed all my friends who were less excited because of StaticPage lack of basic features. So I started working on the second version which took about another month and a half. This time I showed StaticPage to potential users on Fiverr. To my surprise there were about 15% of people who actually liked it and even gave me a usage review, another 60% were not interested nor understood what I was writing, 15% thought I was spamming them. legit.
Business Entrepreneurship Course
3 Months into coding and endless hours of video lectures about entrepreneurship didn’t help me to understand a lot more about building up a business. So I have decided it’s time for me to take a course on the subject at hand because it will help me with the making of StaticPage.
3 Months later, once a week later I have completed the course and I’m feeling smarter! Not really but I do feel more aware of the surroundings of getting a business up and running. It did help me grasp some financial and business concepts. In retrospect I should have taken a more comprehensive course about finance and business, maybe, later on, I will. Bottom line, this course gave me some structure on how to get things done at the beginning of a business and I’m proud to start writing down business and financial plans.
What’s the Future Brings?
I think the future of StaticPage will bring good things, especially version 3! Which will be based upon usage reviews of the kind people of Fiverr and my friends. :)
The Best to Last
All this journey could not have happened if not for my amazing and supportive wife which also helps me with marketing and content. A friend, Yaron Rosen, made an awesome logo for StaticPage. If you need one you should talk to him!