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by coding-saints
3171 days ago
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I think the answer these days should be "hire a programmer". Never would I try and do a profession I did not understand, especially if it had something to do with profit/income. While WIX does have a nice community paying for their WYSIWYG, I would advise anyone to pay an experienced developer to create/maintain their site over doing it themselves. |
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The difficulty with that answer is that the market for web development is becoming bimodal.
On the low end, you have the site builder tools: Wix, WP, Squarespace, and so on. These days you have to include Facebook pages in there as well. You can set up a basic online presence for next to no money with these, and in most cases you can buy a reasonably professional-looking theme to make your site look decent for not much more. Of course you're limited to common features and have few opportunities for customisation, but does a web page announcing your local church events really need any more?
On the high end, you have bespoke development. Someone like me, or no doubt many others on HN, can build you a site that does more or less anything and adopts whatever distinctive branding you need. However, we're going to charge about as much for an hour or two of our time as the whole thing costs with one of the site builder tools, and your final bill is going to have at least two more zeroes on it to do roughly the same job and probably more if we're doing anything that makes it worth using us in the first place.
There isn't much room in between any longer. The days of getting your neighbour's kid's school friend to build your company web site for $500 are gone. The site builder tools have commoditised the low end of the market, and for that kind of money they'll probably offer better results, while no agency nor even any established freelancer is likely to get out of bed for a gig that small.
In short, hiring a professional doesn't really make sense for a lot of small business or community web sites any more. Either you need something truly unique and customised, in which case you need the time and money to match, or you're probably better off just using a site builder if you don't have the resources available to do it in-house.