Web development wasn't always this complicated. When did building websites become so convoluted and unsatisfying?

It gets more and more complicated every year, although technologies should be making it simpler. Beginners are often confused with too many options to choose from. Some that either require advanced skills or do not offer enough quality and flexibility. Some modern technologies that are considered to be the standard of web development can be overwhelmingly complex, it is no wonder people think it is rocket science. The tools available today can be disappointing in many ways, it seems like they are stuck on the how and not the why.

"How can we make it universal, interoperable, scalable... Wait a minute... Why does it need to be?"

Web development is actually very easy, a lot of people already know the HTML basics. Websites are also simple by nature, they are based on text files. Somewhere along the way people forgot about this.

The vision we have is to make web development simple [again] and prove that making websites is not rocket science, it is something for everybody. We want to get back to basics, to where it all began, bringing with us the things that are obvious, natural and useful.

When we say website development, we mean not only the websites themselves, but also the CMS application, the management area of the website. Features should not be reserved for only good web developers, they should be easy to build for everyone.

When we look at the CMS options available what do we see? Things like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and some others. These are all overly complex and convoluted systems, that can be quite disappointing if we look inside or try to build something beyond the standard templates. They are old school by design and not always nice to look at.

For a basic task like creating a new page with a specific URL and specific layout is even difficult using Wordpress. This is not a trivial task, yet why is it so difficult? In October you can quickly create a file in the theme directory and specify the URL in the header, like this:

title = "About us"
url = "/about"
==
<h1>About October</h1>
...

This is so simple a child could use it. This is what we feel everyone knows in their hearts: that web development should be quick, simple, easy and fun! This is why we made October, a platform for everybody.