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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> They learn React/Vue/Angular/whatever, then seemingly decide everything they will ever build will use that framework, regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job.

At least where I live, small businesses contract with agencies that develop React sites for them, and suddenly these non-IT companies are owners of expensive and hard to maintain websites that they don't, and shouldn't need to, know the first thing about maintaining. No one wants to work with the projects, because they were written in, say 2015 React, back when React used X feature that isn't cool anymore, so it gets rewritten by another agency, and so on.

Meanwhile, WordPress on a managed host or a static site would suit those businesses just fine. Then, they wouldn't have trouble hiring to maintain it, or could even maintain it themselves.

If you work for an agency or you're freelancing, please stop burdening small businesses like this.

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Serious question: if the business just needs a static site, why are they paying tons of money for bespoke software engineering? Just use one of the millions of good-enough and free site builders out there.

They don't know any better, and when they turn to the experts, they get upsold. Some business owners think they're the exception to the rule and seek out agencies for bespoke work, but again, they don't know any better.

But, yes, I've seen countless businesses for which something like Wix is perfect.

I think there are a few issues:

1. Site builders are still hard to use for most marketing staff, if the site should look professional and you need a few small integrations.

2. They don't mind paying for a solution where someone else does the work.

I guess it's hard for marketing departments to pick an appropriate agency and to know the consequences of the technical choices the agency makes. They generally evaluate based on design and then have a few requirements like: resonable performance and support for a handful of features in the backlog.

> Meanwhile, WordPress on a managed host or a static site would suit those businesses just fine. Then, they wouldn't have trouble hiring to maintain it, or could even maintain it themselves.

> If you work for an agency or you're freelancing, please stop burdening small businesses like this.

There aren't many more soul-destroying experiences as a freelance developer than maintaining a neglected WordPress installation that was built by a maverick agency that took the money and disappeared.

So much this. Bad plugins and outdated versions, cheap hosting with outdated PHP versions, cheap development with bad code quality. WordPress imho is not made to last without regular maintenance.

Honestly, 90% of the work out there seems to be maintaining some heap of shit, whether it is built in Python or Wordpress or whatever. All the better paid work at least. I have a theory that if a company has been around long enough top make money the software will be a mess.

That's why I suggested a managed WordPress host, so that they can outsource maintenance of their instance to professionals.

These projects get completely rewritten because they aren't fun to work with for most developers. What is being ignored is that there is an immense pool of labor that specializes in WordPress et al, and they're relatively cheap to hire. Even if these companies don't have dedicated staff to run their sites, many people are capable of using WordPress as long as its maintenance is outsourced to a managed host.

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