Bootstrap Studio Sites

Hello there. I can not find any additional information about Bootstrap Studio hosted Sites beside one from the license agreement. Does anybody have some experience with BS hosting service and Smart Forms? Is it a good idea to host with them client’s site created in BS and propose client to buy BS license and use it as some kind of CMS? Will appreciate any info and thoughts about it.

Regarding the first part of your questions, I personally do not use the free hosting or smart forms that come with BSS, so I am not able to tell you whether a BSS user on one computer can access a site built and hosted on the BSS servers by a BSS user on a different computer. I believe the free hosting is account-specific, meaning each installed version of BSS can only access the free hosting available to that particular program installation, but I could be wrong.

Regarding this question…

Personally, I would say, “no.” I think that’s a bad idea, and here is why…

BSS is not a CMS, it is software for building Bootstrap based websites. It is nothing like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. There is no way to designate “content areas” of a website built with BSS that could be “managed.” Anyone who has BSS and access to a website built with it, would be able to change (or break) any part of the website. So they would need to know how to use BSS in order to go into the website and edit/update specific parts of site themselves. If they are not website developers, or familiar with using the program, chances are they’ll just end up messing up the website.

Thank you for you response and honest opinion. I got your point. I am looking for cheapest for client and easiest for me option of hosting and creating static web site and for 60$ it looks like reasonable deal, even with cons you have mentioned, but I want to hear first user’s experience ,if there are any, about that extra options BS provide, before consider it as possible option.

Once again like PN I am not a user of the Sites or Forms, but I have information that might help or hinder depending on your clients and their needs. The things I see the most on the forums since they added that system are:

  1. Forms are too basic, cannot edit much of the default messages like the thank you message.
  2. Forms are only in English and no way to edit the pages that are static to change the language.
  3. You cannot upload at all other than what is inside BSS. You can reference external areas in the pages of BSS, but you cannot upload any supporting files other than what are within the BSS design. This has been the bane of many.

That brings me to the issue you will have with your CMS idea. You will probably need to upload some files that are not able to be imported into BSS (unless you can make them into CDN’s that is.) and that is not possible at this time. I’m not sure what CMS you’re using, but most that I’ve seen that are able to be added to an HTML website (and there are quite a few these days) usually require extra files that aren’t importable to BSS.

Those are the main things that have been complained about for quite some time. I do not have any idea if they plan to change any of the above to make any allowances, but right now that’s how it rolls.

Ordinarily I would never steer someone away from BSS, but based the requirements you’ve described, the solution seems obvious - WordPress. It’s free, and once you build the site, your client/customer can manage and update it themselves without any risk of them messing up the website. Wordpress was built specifically as a CMS with options for allowing the owner of the site to grant other people limited degrees of access.

All you’d need to do is get hosting, and there is very inexpensive (and even free) hosting available these days.

While Bootstrap Studio is inexpensive (as builders goes) and comes with free hosting and free forms, it was not designed to build websites for other people to manage, even if they bought their own copy of BSS. Really, you would just be asking for trouble, and setting the stage for a disaster because if your client can’t build a website themselves, then it’s more likely that they’d mess up whatever website you built for them in their attempts to update or add content to it.

This is not the right tool for the task you’re facing.