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I think I just discovered I hate modern web design.

Way too many tech stacks for basic sites exist to do the same thing with marginal advantages.   I've been on Blogger reluctantly for several years now.  I watch the cooler templates pass by while my decently fast serving and free choice with custom domain stays in the early 2000's.  

I just built a Portfolio page using Wix and the studio app is dismally slow to load items.  I got excited about the AI to figure out a design automatically.  I'm skeptical of the page speed after it's done with pages.  Then I noticed that even the basic paid version keeps Wix ads on your page.

I also am trying out Wordpress hosted on Wordpress.com and it's slightly cleaner experience but I'm struggling to get the portfolio page I want.  I had to dig through templates to figure out how to make the top nav appear.

No blog tool seems to intelligently adapt to the image dimensions I add. Both Wordpress and Wix crop photos very strangely when I add them to a Portfolio template.

Github Pages looks compelling for speed and simplicity but is completely devoid of features like email capture, and social sharing.  I took a few hours to get the basics of Jekyll and Markdown and the simplicity is compelling but it's clear I'll be hand-coding html if I go this route.  And if I go hand-code I'm going to be tempted to learn Bootstrap.

Good news is that most hosted tools automatically adapt to mobile now.

Where is the ultimate small business CMS:

  1. Fast ... at least Google App Engine fast. 
  2. Completely hosted
  3. Secure ... at least Google secure.
  4. Modern designs ... at least Squarespace modern. 
  5. Captures emails.
  6. Zero setup social sharing.  
I think that combo could meet the needs of several million small businesses.  So that's the summary after a week of trudging through options to compose an web portfolio.   

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