“I have a great idea for a website. I’m not sure if it is going to cost $5 or $500,000.” — everyone’s aunt, uncle, or cousin

Everyone has an idea for a website or an app at one time or another. A lot of the time, they are bad ideas and most of the time, people don’t follow through with actually making it happen. There are many ways to make a website. This is a made-up story about you. You love color, color palettes and talking about color. You love color so much, that you want to make a website about color.

Static Website

Your first website is a tribute page to your favorite color, hex #FF6347, also known as “tomato”. You download Atom, code the page up in HTML and add some CSS to style it. You create a tomato-colored box at the top of the page and write a couple paragraphs about when you first saw the color and how it inspires you. Sign up for hosting, buy a domain and FTP it up to http://www.tomatoiskatiesfavoritecolor.com or http://www.tomatoiskatiesfavouritecolour.ca.

This isn’t good enough, because you really liked making the website and want to make more pages. So, you create a navigation at the top and create a couple more pages like “About Me”, “My Second Favorite Color”, and “Contact” which lists your email address and links to your Facebook and Instagram pages.

Static Site Generator

Creating new web pages is fun, but there are a lot of repetitive tasks that you’d like to not deal with like copying and pasting your header and footer every time you create a new page. Static site generators like Middleman and Jekyll are great for automating these repetitive tasks. When you’re using Middleman on your computer, you run a Ruby server and it automatically refreshes the page when you make a change. Middleman enables you to compile that code into static HTML & CSS pages. You can FTP those up to your old hosting account, or use something cheaper (free) & easier like Github Pages or Surge.sh.

Blog Aware Static Site Generator

You decide you want to start a weekly blog about your latest color inspirations and you still enjoy using a static site generator for now. So, you enable the blog aware functionality of the generators and instead of needing to individually code out the HTML for each page, you can write a text file in Markdown language and it’ll be automatically formatted into a predetermined layout and make sure that your newest blog entries show up on the front page.

Services

There are services you can embed in your static pages too. If you want to add a contact form, you can use formspree or formkeep. If you want to collect your favorite posts and sell a Guide to Color Appreciation ebook, you can use Gumroad.

Site Builder

By now, you’re sick of needing to edit the HTML and CSS whenever you want to change something. You’re over trying to understand the box-model and sick of people telling you to use Sass or Less. You love writing about color and you want to focus on just the content. So, you use a site builder like Squarespace or Webflow. You get your typography, themes and layout all set and you can focus on what you really want to do: publish your writing about color palettes and inspiration.

Squarespace has all of the contact form and store features built in. You even change the website’s name to tomatokate.com.

Content Management System

Business is going gangbusters. You’re selling thousands of copies of your color theory ebooks and companies are hiring you to to speak at their events and consult on their color choices in their stores. Your Squarespace website is fine, but you’re making some real money now and you ran into a couple other websites that were using the same theme as you. You hire an agency who builds you a custom Wordpress website. They toss in a bunch of plugins for companies to schedule you for consultation and when someone shares your blog post to Facebook, it’ll be one of those nifty Google AMP pages. You start building a network of guest contributors to write blog posts for you because you’re so busy traveling the world talking about color.

Commerce

You install the WooCommerce plugin and now you’re selling your book in physical form. You integrate your WooCommerce with Printful and now you’re dropshipping color palette themed posters, coffee mugs, tshirts and leggings across the country.

Web App

“A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” — Jacques Grande from The Love Guru

The difference between a webapp and a website is this: a webapp can generate an infinite number of outcomes based on end user input & action. There are an infinite number of photos that can be uploaded to instagram and an infinite number of email newsletters that can be built with Mailchimp. But, there is a finite number of articles to read on Gary Vaynerchuk’s Blog and a finite number of clothing items to buy on Gap.com. Now, back to you.

You decide that, while you are the foremost expert now on color, you want to grow your reach even larger. You want to create the Instagram for Color Palettes. Users can create their own accounts, build and name their own color palettes and earn comments and likes from other users. You can cobble together all the wordpress plugins in the world, and you’re not going to make a good version of this product.

What you need to do, is build a custom web application. This often involves hiring someone to use a web framework like Ruby on Rails or Laravel (there are many many others). This can be really costly to hire a firm to build, or you can teach yourself.

Single Page Web Application

People all over the world are visiting kateomato.io to build and share color palettes. VCs are knocking on your door ready to throw money at you. Your site works, but you want it to be smoother and faster and have a drag-and-drop interface to construct palettes and color themes. This is when you add a frontend framework on top of your webapp like Angular, React or Vue.

API

Your website is doing great, but people want to use all this great color information on your website and build their own apps on top of your app. This is when you open up an Application Program Interface (or API) to third party users. That way, people can build fun tools such as a Chrome extension to display a new random color palette every time a new tab is opened. Someone else can build Kateomatr, a Tinder for color palettes.

That’s it. You’re ready for IPO or acquisition and on your way to retirement.

This article was written by David Ray. You can find him at daplgray.com. He also likes to be funny on the internet.

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