Amateur Web Design & Development
I have never written software, aside from a short time many years ago when I found myself needing to write assembly language for an Intel 80C8x, and had no one to help me. I also don’t claim to know much about HTML and CSS, but I have managed to learn what I need to know, so I use this page to explain why I cannot answer questions from others.
Until a few years ago, I relied on my good friend and mentor, Matt Knowles, to “develop”, maintain, and “host” sites for me. Matt grew up in the canyons of Silicon Valley, then moved to Northern California, where he works from his home. As for this discussion, we are going to skip over definitions, like frontend/backend, design vs development, ICANN and the WEB because Google can explain those things as needed – and go straight to the three main options for a starting place.
If you are Honda or United Airlines or just an aspiring Procter and Gamble start-up, you will need an office building full of people, and probably others in far-off places, writing code around the clock.
If your goal is to publish your son’s soccer team schedules, you will be happy with WIX, or similar offerings from GoDaddy and others. They all do the same things. You can even set up an online store, but that’s probably not the best place to do that.
Those of us in the middle have some choices. I have used others like Drupal, Magento, and Joomla, but WordPress stands out with the major market share, partly because of its D&D&P service through affiliate WordPress.com. It has the same limitations as the other D&D&P competitors, while WordPress.org allows for full customization and plugins.
Prudent minds could differ on the subject, but I generally think of a website as a place to maintain detailed information like prices, business hours, and detailed explanations of products and services, rather than a tool to attract new customers. Of course, it can be used for advertising, but the time and cost of SEO and constantly updating content are better spent on social media.
Recent focus group reporting suggests that the kind of “Glitz” popularized in social media is often detrimental when used on websites[iii]floating windows, BGs, sticky sidebars, and Widgets. It seems that users who at first fall for all the glitz and what I call Dancing Bears become annoyed with it when they want some real information, so I prefer to keep the two things separate.
Social Media
“Dancing Bears”
Lots of glitz and action
Great for generating interest
Reaches high numbers quickly
Perfect for short video clips
Website
“Nuts & Bolts”
Simple bullets & tables
Video descriptions
Product comparisons
Prices
Business hours
A decade or more ago, page builders like Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, and Elementor came on the scene, which led to the era of the D&D&P. Even WordPress added its own block editor, called Gutenberg, a few years ago. I prefer to stick with the Classic editor, not just because I started with it, but because it uses more-or-less pure html. That becomes important when you want to switch from one host to another or even from one page builder to another for different projects. The page builders make that very difficult because they all have their own way of dealing with the code, which is often not compatible.