80% of my time I'm doing modern JavaScript development.
A few years ago, I had a tiny studio where I built and sold small webshops.
I have no idea how I'd convince a small customer how this is any better than WooCommerce slapped on a $5 droplet.
A few years ago, I had a tiny studio where I built and sold small webshops.
I have no idea how I'd convince a small customer how this is any better than WooCommerce slapped on a $5 droplet.
After a while, I swallowed my pride and started to use them. I am not building the next google, or the next Uber. I'm writing projects on the side for small businesses.
Nothing comes even close to the wordpress, PHP ecosystem. Nothing
I’m not a fan. But I’m not a fan for the use case of major publishing platform.
For small businesses, small e-commerce, small blogs or publications it’s great. But for the love of god, I wish people would stop extrapolating that fact to mean it’s good for everything. But now there’s a cottage industry built around selling that very idea to ignorant people for a high fee. Total racket.
If it's going to take more than a week, I directly involve Entity Framework (recently more Dapper than EF but anyway), React/Next.js, Typescript (switched from NHibernate + knockout.js to this stack lately). Most of the pages are rendered on the server. Performance is crazy. Maintainability is great too! They need to call me, or hire one of the many react/.NET devs available if an update/migration is needed, but it's easy to understand as no magic is involved.
We need to understand that these 2 are shockingly separate worlds. So, all these words just to say that I agree with you :) But there is one catch: Sometimes a quickly implemented site organically grows into multi-sites, or into an app that does more than to manage content, that's the point the customer needs to understand these concepts too.
Better to explain to them from the beginning!
I see so many major publishers doing just what I've described, too, and it bewilders me. There are still a lot of brilliant people working in publishing, even traditional publishing. See the New York Times digital teams, after all.
But there is a gaping void of high-functioning software for digital publishing that is extensible, and that is easily integrated with existing workflows (InDesign/InCopy as either an endpoint or an entry point—or better yet, two-way) and capable of multichannel publishing out of the box.
And not just in the creative and digital ends. There is a sore lack of labour-reducing software in the print world as well. Flyer creation—tens of thousands of hours a year are burned just moving data from a spreadsheet into templates. (I have similar critiques of Excel here: use it for the data entry, tabling, what have you. But don't try and make your mock-up layout in there and expect that to 1:1 translate to InDesign without any labour. And for the love of god do not promote it as such)
The impasses I've seen are as such: a lot of tech assumes publishing and printing are "dead", people in industries that have tradition baked into workflows are not open to learning a new tool every year to do the same task so it needs to be a substantial improvement/change, and publishing doesn't have the same piles of VC/investor cash behind it that it had in the 90's (much like "tech" does now).
But I digress...
You don’t have to build Wordpress sites as a freelancer if you’re in a good commercial position where you can find other kinds of work, but to your point I agree that one needs to admit when it’s the better solution. And for small businesses, it’s quite often so.