I’ve been building websites and working in the IT field for over 10 years now. I’ve never been a fan of wordpress; its bloated, slow, introduces a ton of security risks, and requires much more time and energy to build out a website that I could do in half the time with a hand coded html, css and javascript site. I’ve convinced many people to avoid wordpress in the past, but recently that recommendation is shifting in the other direction. More and more businesses require a multitude of functionality from their websites that requires databases and nothing else exists that can bring it all together as well and as easily as WordPress does. Joining this subreddit has peaked both my curiosity and concern for the web design and development industry.
One big problem I have with WordPress is how glorified it has become among the do-it-yourself crowds which brings a lack of awareness to the pros and cons, and the reality of what results they are getting, or rather not getting, due to having nothing else to compare it to or perhaps a bad experience with a poor developer/designer in the past. People are left with impressions like SEO being a plugin you can just install and fill in with keywords. Good luck with that.
Then theres the amatures who consider themselves professionals after spending 2 weeks to learn how to use wordpress and can now get a website online that doesn’t look half bad. Then a friend or family member needs a website and they say hey, I can do it… and get paid for their first gig. This is when they realize they can start a business doing this since theres very little investment required other than time. So they go around selling their services at such a low rate that its hard to compete, and the clients in this industry don’t realize what they are getting or missing out on with no clue to the experience and knowledge level of the person they are hiring, often times being over represented in their skillsets and experience and overpromising results, leading to the above mentioned situation of leaving a bad impression and question of value in hiring a professional to do it for them.
**So, I want to know; If you created your own website with wordpress, what motivated you to do so?** Was it a lack of capital to invest in hiring a professional, and if so, what was your budget? Was it because you thought / found it was easy enough that hiring a professional wouldn’t be worth it? Did you have a bad experience in the past? Or maybe it was just a fun and interesting thing you wanted to learn and do? Was it having control over every aspect? What exactly pushed you to do it yourself?
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