[osrec]

Hell yes! Just don't try and be the guy making 3 page info sites for your local gardener/bakery/whatever. There's simply no money in that, as they can do that themselves for free with an online website builder, so the value add from a good dev is minimal.

Once you've honed your skills, focus on the more complex, bespoke projects. Become good at delivering on time and try to find clients that wish to invest in tech to improve their business further. They will generally appreciate your work more and will not hesitate to pay you good money if you're genuinely adding to their bottom line.

[tomxor]

> Just don't try and be the guy making 3 page info sites for your local gardener/bakery/whatever.

This, THIS! Many web devs do a bit of this starting out and that's fine... just don't try to make it into something more, not only because it's worthless and the clients will drive you nuts by chasing them for petty bills but because you will also get bored out of your mind. Get involved in, or start a more significant project as soon as possible (Even FOSS for no money is better for your experience than wasting more time on these).

[kiallmacinnes]

Completely agree. Doing a few of these is fine, but for most people, it'll get pretty boring pretty fast.

Add in the business side - finding clients, chasing bills, and the small 3 page sites won't be making you any money unless you have an army of developers churning them out.

Personally, I see "Web Developer" as a skillset worth knowing, not an industry to be in. Use small gigs to learn HTML, CSS, Wordpress etc - but branch out. Contribute to some FOSS JS/PHP/Ruby/C#/whatever libraries, build some sites without WordPress or similar, and angle yourself towards being a web developer at a company who tag line isn't "Web Development" (or digital marketing!).

All that said, I know there are people who LOVE the 3 page site work. So maybe that is what you want, but it wasn't for me :)

[lostgame]

>> Just don't try and be the guy making 3 page info sites for your local gardener/bakery/whatever.

The main problem with this is these days it's so easy to whip something together with Wordpress and a template, and many web hosting and domain purchasing sites even offer extremely simple ways to set these types of sites up.

Quite frankly, it was never that hard, but these days the value proposition is practically nil.

[Raphmedia]

> as they can do that themselves for free with an online website builder, so the value add from a good dev is minimal.

And on the opposite side, it is quite easy to start a business of creating websites using those tools with minimum knowledge. I know a few people who started from that and eventually moved to more complex projects.