Building full website with Hype?

Hello, does anybody have experience building full site with Hype?
What are the pros and cons?

Hi! :slight_smile:

For the last chapter of the Hype book, I tried making a website with Hype.

It's better than I thought it would be, but a bit tedious — especially if you're using breakpoints.

The Pros...

  • If you're not planning to change the website very much, it's a nice low-maintenance solution. Content Management Systems need constant updating.

  • It's a great offline (no cloud) solution, such as for Kiosks or Intranets.

  • It's a clean slate. You don't have to build yet another Bootstrap based site or use another WordPress theme. (Says the guy with 2016 on his website. HA HA.) Instead, your site can have a dramatically unique look.

  • Hype has animation features that would be tough to reproduce with many other apps... line drawing, Physics, keyframe based animation.

  • If you already have Hype, and don't feel like buying other software, why not?! :smile:

The Cons...

  • The software is not specifically designed to create entire websites. It's more like Flash than Dreamweaver.

  • Using scenes, instead of pages, doesn't seem like a good idea for Search Engine Optimization.

  • It's tough getting past that blank screen, because you have to create everything from scratch.

  • It doesn't have collaboration tools, like comments, multiple content editors, or anything dynamic. You'd either have to plug that stuff into your Hype project or simply do without it.

  • With WordPress.com, Wix, or Squarespace, it's not much of a cost savings, since the Hype project would need hosting anyway.


So basically, if you're working by yourself, you don't want the hassle of maintaining a CMS, you don't need comments or any other such dynamic web doohickeys, you want to make something super unique, you already have Hype, you already have web hosting lined up, and you don't mind powering through some of the tedious parts of the project — it might work.

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Thank you for you answer.
What about the speed/performance comparing for example with SliderRevolution?
Do you have any experience or benchmarks?

I built a huge number of sites in Hype as part of a marketing package for our local dealers - four pages with personalized content. Hype is good for such things but I would not use it as the backbone for ambitious sites. It works far better in iframes on sites built with dedicated web apps.

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I'm glad you asked. :smile:

Another advantage of using Hype is that you can build a lightweight site.

It absolutely crushed the web.dev audit. I had to do some tweaks to get that score, and I believe that missing point in performance is bogus, but it wasn't too hard add the missing pieces.

Although, you could easily get a terrible score with Hype — large images, bad accessibility, poor web server. It depends how Hype is used.

I haven't used SliderRevolution, so I don't know how that would work out. It looks like a theming tool that works with WordPress. I can tell you that my WordPress site — which is intentionally lightweight — doesn't score as high as my Hype webpage. Even with the basic Twentysixteen theme, it takes a bit of a hit performance wise.

...but the difference is negligible. I think it's more of an issue if you want build something the easy way or if you want to create a customized — and highly animated — website.

Since the latter is not common, the typical recommendation is a lot like what @Furutan said. It's generally better if you put Hype in a webpage, rather than building the whole webpage with Hype.

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