Fixture Website Builder
Take back your website! Build your site in your AWS bucket.
You can now try out Fixture for yourself. Just start be creating a site:
Fixture produces faster sites than any other CMS or website builder. Read the 5 tips we rely on to make our sites run so fast:
https://fixture.app/post/5-tips-for-making-your-website-faster.html
What is Fixture (https://fixture.app)? What makes it different from the 1,000+ other website building solutions? Why would you choose Fixture over Wordpress or Squarespace? These are all great questions that I spent a lot of time thinking about even before writing a single line of code. I came up with the following key pillars of Fixture.
- Fixture is serverless.
Why should you care how a solution is built? Well, it turns out that it matters a lot. Fixture uses only AWS serverless solutions: DynamoDB, Lambda, Cognito, S3, and SES. It benefits from all the reliability and security of these solutions. And, there is no mystery architecture sitting between your desk and your site.
- Fixture gives you control.
Fixture allows you to store your site in your own bucket. By adding Cloudfront and Route53 on top of your bucket, you have a fully SSL secured solution with a high quality CDN for just a few bucks a month. The best part of the whole solution is that you completely control the bucket. You can replicate it, back it up, sync it to another bucket, and control access.
- Fixture is fast.
The Fixture website (https://fixture.app) runs completely on Fixture. It scores a 99 on performance for Lighthouse and renders the first paint in under 1.7 seconds. This is not by accident. Fixture was built from the ground-up to be really fast. It does this by producing minimal code to display the site, rendering the site in static HTML to minimize request processing, and putting it all behind an ultra-fast CDN.
- Fixture is affordable.
Coming from the open-source world, I appreciate the need to make a solution cost-effective. A lot of developers and designers that use my open source products do so because they cost less than traditional website SAAS solutions. That is why I set pricing on Fixture to start at just a few bucks a month. Pairing Fixture with AWS will often result 25-40% savings over a traditional website builder.
- Fixture is beautiful.
While beauty is often in the eyes of the beholder, I built Fixture so that it is beautiful and easy-to-use. I enjoy using it everyday to maintain my own sites. And, I do believe that other will enjoy using it as much as they have with my previous products.
The idea for Fixture did not just spring up overnight. Fixture began much more organically. Fixture got its roots in Respond CMS (https://respondcms.com). I built Respond about 10 years ago. Believe it or not, Respond was the first (or at least one of the first) content management solutions to fully embrace responsive design. It had a small following and over the years has probably been the basis for over 1,000 sites. It never hit a tipping point, but it certainly was loved by those that used it.
Fast forward to a year ago. I started exploring better ways to deploy Respond websites. Because Respond produced static (100% HTML) websites, AWS buckets seemed like a great choice. In fact, it surpassed my expectations. Respond sites deployed to AWS ran really fast and had zero server dependency. It took the burden off having to maintain a server to deploy sites. The CMS still required a server, but maintaining that was a little less stressful because downtime did not mean sites were down.
But, that was where the idea for Fixture struck: What if I did not have to worry about servers at all? Could you deploy and manage websites just using AWS without the dependency of a running server.
Well, it turns out you can. And, it is unbelievably cool. Fixture builds and maintains websites completely using AWS services. No servers at all. The best part of the solution is that you can tie it to your own AWS account. So, Fixture acts as a serverless piece of your infrastructure w/o having to maintain it.
The Fixture website is live at: https://fixture.app/
The website is built entirely using the Fixture website builder. This is a point of pride as the Lighthouse audit scores a 99 for performance with a first meaningful paint at 1.7 seconds!
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