Quick Start

Get started building your site on Hot Page and learn some of the best practices of web development

Hot Page is a new way to create web sites, a hybrid between a code editor and a graphical site builder. You can read more about the philosophy of why the editor is built this way in our manifesto.

Hot Page excels at building static sites, meaning sites with content that doesn’t change based on who comes to visit the page. This probably includes most personal and small business web sites, things like a portfolio or a restaurant menu or the like.

If you’re looking to build such a site, Hot Page simplifies a lot of the pain points of getting your content online. Here are some of the annoying and expensive things that Hot Page handles for you:

• Hosting Your pages live on our server, so there’s no need to find a web host.
• Instant Updates The changes you make to your pages will be reflected immediately. There’s no need to upload anything for readers to see the latest version.
• Responsive Images One of the most annoying aspects of web development is keeping track of images and making sure they are not weighing down your pages, especially on slower mobile connections. Hot Page has an image library that automatically converts your images and serves the right one to the right device.

To be honest, many web editors provide similar features. What makes Hot Page different is what we don’t do:

• Design your page The Hot Page way is not to offer you templates with a pre-made design. This software is for people who probably already know what they want and just need a little help building it.
• Impose an Abstraction Some site builders hide all your code behind a visual editor. Others make you use complex templating systems. When you use Hot Page, you are using the same core web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) that professionals use to create pages from zero. You won’t be limited by the choices we’ve made and what you learn while building will be portable to your next project— no matter where you decide to do it.
• Create a Walled Garden If you can't see your code, or if your site was written with a proprietary templating language, you're trapped. Hot Page will never do that to you. You can leave Hot Page at any time and take your site with you. Seriously, just download your site and cancel your account. We will be sorry to see you go, but we will be glad to have helped you along the way.

This documentation provides an overview on how to begin building your site on Hot Page. Given the low-level nature of the editor, it’s also a primer on web development in general. It will not teach you everything you need to know, but it provides an overview of some basic concepts and things you should keep in mind.

The best way to learn web development is by practicing it! So even before you start reading, play around with the editor and see how fast you can get your site online. Then start making it better piece by piece.

Page vs Site

On Hot Page you can create sites and pages and it’s important to understand the difference between the two of them.

Sites are collections of pages that share a domain name, like example.hot.page. All of your sites are visible in the editor at https://hotpage.dev/.

Each site has a name and can be accessed in your browser by name.hot.page. If you’ve added your own domain name, then this domain will redirect to your site.

Pages must live inside a site. One site can have any number of directories and pages. The file path (or simply "path") is the specific location of one page. Here are some examples:

• example.hot.page/—This is the "site root." The slash means that it’s a default page for the whole site. A site or directory can only have one default page.
• example.hot.page/about — A page called About.
• example.hot.page/animals/ — The default page for a directory called Animals.
• example.hot.page/animals/fuzzy-animals/cats — A page about cats, inside of a directory called Fuzzy Animals, inside a directory called Animals.