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To the people who use Wix, Shopify, or Wordpress...

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

Christopher104

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Stop.

Your trying to take a shortcut. You look like a money chaser.

Rather than learn how to engineer and build your online presence you would give control to CMS builders that generate bad html and seo structure and host your web services for you.

What happens if their servers crash?

What happens when they raise their hosting prices?

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?

You have no say in the matter. Did these CMS systems make people money once upon a time? Yeah the first ones to use it.

Now these systems have saturated the market and now its really hard to make something that's exceptional.

Use common sense too. Do you think Amazon was created with these systems? Do you think this forum was created with these systems? Do you think IMDb was created with these systems?

Absolutely not. Because the owners of these businesses and domains knew that professional skillsets couldn't be replicated with a few drag and drops.

Stop trying to get rich easy. Hire a developer or learn to code yourself.
 
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Charnell

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This entire post is bad, and you should feel bad.
Your trying to take a shortcut.
Damn right. Why would I create a custom solution to something that's already created when I can focus on, oh, I don't know, revenue?

Rather than learn how to engineer and build your online presence you would give control to CMS builders that generate bad html and seo structure and host your web services for you.
Ah yes, WordPress, terrible SEO structure and web host.

What happens if their servers crash?
The same thing that would happen if any other server crashes. I suppose you have your own server in-home?

What happens when they raise their hosting prices?
I pay more for not having to deal with owning a server.

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?
Users do. Even as an SEO, there is more to the internet than SEO.
CMS systems
Just me being pedantic, but CMS stands for content management system. Do you say ATM machine and PIN number?

Do you think this forum was created with these systems?
It was created with XenForo, a forum software solution.

If you have an urge to validate your HTML and CSS skills, there are other ways. Just because Joe Blow down the street can get the same results as you in a fraction of the time doesn't mean he's wrong, you just haven't caught up yet. Don't tell me you're one of those devs that like to create custom websites with convoluted or absent documentation so you can retain clients.
 

JByers210

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BizyDad

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This entire post is bad, and you should feel bad.

Damn right. Why would I create a custom solution to something that's already created when I can focus on, oh, I don't know, revenue?


Ah yes, WordPress, terrible SEO structure and web host.


The same thing that would happen if any other server crashes. I suppose you have your own server in-home?


I pay more for not having to deal with owning a server.


Users do. Even as an SEO, there is more to the internet than SEO.

Just me being pedantic, but CMS stands for content management system. Do you say ATM machine and PIN number?


It was created with XenForo, a forum software solution.

If you have an urge to validate your HTML and CSS skills, there are other ways. Just because Joe Blow down the street can get the same results as you in a fraction of the time doesn't mean he's wrong, you just haven't caught up yet. Don't tell me you're one of those devs that like to create custom websites with convoluted or absent documentation so you can retain clients.

Hilarious. And I DO say PIN number.

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?

Yes. At least Google does. There are several elements of what a website looks like that is factored into their algorithm.

I don't, You're just offended.

This is a weak response.

Offended by what? I thought he brought up excellent counter points.

Telling everyone who wants to have a website that they should learn to code or hire a developer. That's nonsense. And I run a custom development / SEO shop.

Telling people to avoid wix? That's something I agree with. But not for the reasons you laid out. Simply because there are better options on the market for everything wix tries to do.

You look like a money chaser.

To whom? How many people even notice if it's a wix or squarespace or WordPress site?

I could go on, but Charnell already dissected the post, and you don't want to hear it, so why bother...
 

James Klymus

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Why buy a car? Build your own.

Why buy food? Farm your own.

Why buy a house? Build your own.

Why go out to eat? Cook for your self.

Why buy a phone? Build one your self.

There is no honor in doing things the hard way if you don't have to. A lot of bakers use boxed cake mix that you could buy at the grocery store. Why don't they formulate their own? They aren't chemists or food scientists. They're bakers. They have someone else formulate shit for them so they can focus on their business.

Most starting entrepreneurs aren't coders, and have no budget to hire people that are. They just want to get their idea out there and see if it works. These services remove that barrier and make it easier for people to innovate.

The point of services like this is to get ideas to market QUICKLY and not have to be bogged down with all of the technical stuff. Do you understand how hard it used to be to create a website, let alone an entire storefront with a cart and payment processing pre paypal? You give shopify $40 a month and they handle it all for you. When you build a huge company, then maybe you can worry about your own servers and custom solutions.
 

Hitch-hiker

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Most starting entrepreneurs aren't coders, and have no budget to hire people that are.
Exactly, or there is no time to code your every website.
To build a website with WordPress it takes 1 day, how long it takes to build the website from scratch?
 
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woken

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>Just spend 500 hours learning full stack development to test an ecommerce product for a week

Great idea
Actually that’s another transferable skill you can then use. But it’s not for everybody and the drag and drop platforms thrive for a reason. It saves lots of time.

Since we should avoid shortcuts, I’ll start hunting my own food. :rofl:
( don’t start me on the vegan side of things, you got my point)
 

biophase

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Stop.

Your trying to take a shortcut. You look like a money chaser.

Rather than learn how to engineer and build your online presence you would give control to CMS builders that generate bad html and seo structure and host your web services for you.

What happens if their servers crash?

What happens when they raise their hosting prices?

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?

You have no say in the matter. Did these CMS systems make people money once upon a time? Yeah the first ones to use it.

Now these systems have saturated the market and now its really hard to make something that's exceptional.

Use common sense too. Do you think Amazon was created with these systems? Do you think this forum was created with these systems? Do you think IMDb was created with these systems?

Absolutely not. Because the owners of these businesses and domains knew that professional skillsets couldn't be replicated with a few drag and drops.

Stop trying to get rich easy. Hire a developer or learn to code yourself.
Spoken like someone who has never run an e-commerce business before.
 
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Xeon

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So, John Adams, who wants to launch his own online biz selling handmade footwear for elderly folks with feet issues, needs to learn how to code (HTML/CSS/JS/CMS architecture/payment processing the whole shebang) and create a WooCommerce/Shopify clone FIRST?
 

LiveEntrepreneur

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Stop.

Your trying to take a shortcut. You look like a money chaser.

Rather than learn how to engineer and build your online presence you would give control to CMS builders that generate bad html and seo structure and host your web services for you.

What happens if their servers crash?

What happens when they raise their hosting prices?

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?

You have no say in the matter. Did these CMS systems make people money once upon a time? Yeah the first ones to use it.

Now these systems have saturated the market and now its really hard to make something that's exceptional.

Use common sense too. Do you think Amazon was created with these systems? Do you think this forum was created with these systems? Do you think IMDb was created with these systems?

Absolutely not. Because the owners of these businesses and domains knew that professional skillsets couldn't be replicated with a few drag and drops.

Stop trying to get rich easy. Hire a developer or learn to code yourself.
Thanks for the post actually, I had a nice laugh, haha. I've seen this mentality before, "if you aren't taking the hard way then you are lazy, and want the easy way out" etc. This isn't always the case and it's not that cut and dry, and in your example, it's just plain stupidity. You said to hire a developer, by your own logic wouldn't that be classified as taking a shortcut because someone will not want to learn code and get someone to do it for them?
 
G

Guest-5ty5s4

Guest
You couldn’t be more wrong.

Please go mine your own metal to build the server casing yourself while you’re at it.

There are many reasons to use a third party solution. And it doesn’t mean giving up all control over your business.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

KushShah9492

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Wow.

This is bad on so many levels. Would you code each and every website for a client? If yes, learn full stack development for years, build a website from scratch (which would take a long time as well). OR you could take the easy approach: learn webflow/wordpress/wix -- get good enough at building basic websites using those tools -- speed-up your process.

I'm not saying learning those would be easy, it just takes a lot less time than learning how to code.
 
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Kasual

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It's funny how many programmers circle jerk over WordPress vs. custom built websites. WordPress or any other CMS as a base for your project can be amazing tool for both you and the client. You can leverage the readiness of various plugins so you can bring the solution to the client quicker and cheaper and they will never have the trouble of editing anything on their end (if you don't maintain it), because there are literally millions of guides on the Internet.

Literally no one cares about custom code except those miserable programmers that are somehow trying to glorify their cUsToM cOdEd project. Get over yourself. Businesses are looking to solve their BUSINESS goals, not trying to get a custom website where you can drool over your clean, hand-written code.
 

McAdam

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I work for a 5 year old SaaS company, with over 500,000 daily active users and 100 developers.

Our website is built in Wordpress.... Why?

Because it allows our Devs to focus on our product, and our marketing team to go and make changes and stuff they need without having to put in a request. There's 1 Dev who implements non standard things....

As a business, you need to know where to spend your resources for the maximum impact. Manually coding your landing page is not one of them!

The whole public landing page is built in Wordpress - BUT we build it and serve a "cached" version to visitors.

Plus... Ask most developers and they will tell you HTML is not a programming language (thousands of memes about this)
Its considered a markup language :)
 
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Devilery

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This is not just crap, but an enormous pile of fresh shit.

Just a few examples in my social circle,

- Owner of a real estate agency, why the F*ck would he spend dozens if not hundreds of hours learning to code when all he needs is a basic site that serves as a business card, and maybe feature some listings (can be done with a simple plugin). He's a sales guy!
- Owner of a car repair & painting shop. Should this totally offline business owner who has very little digital anything expertise also learn to code? Is that really the most sensible way if the goal is to paint more cars? A custom-coded site? He's not a tech guy and does NOT need to be.
- An infinite list of other businesses...

It costs me less than $200 FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR to have a website, and that's including a paid builder (Divi) with hundreds of plug-n-play templates. It could be done for less than $100, and if the pricing suddenly doubles (it hasn't in years), it's still an amount that an entry-level business owner couldn't care less about. The cost is so tiny that it's insignificant.

Tell me that you know nothing about running a business without telling it... Go and tell those looking to get started in e-commerce to start by learning how to code.

Edit: Oh, you're the guy/gal who offered to redesign the forum...
 
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kebman

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I think both of the two first posts both have a point! (I've yet to catch up on the rest, but I have a sneaking feeling that most of them are gonna be snarky due to the contentious topic at hand). Because they (the two first posts) both have their upsides and downsides.

Can I code a site from scratch? Yes. Yes I can.

But do I really want to? No!

Or yes (!) if you pay me enough! And if there's a good reason for it. If there's a great idea behind the site that makes it worthwhile to code it from scratch. But not otherwise.

So the point is, there are times when it makes sense to build a site from scratch. But not if you're making a site for Joe Blo. Not if you're copy/pasting sites and/or landing pages for small businesses, with the usual shop at the end. All that has been fully automated and streamlined, so there is just no reason to re-invent the wheel. Unless you know of a great way to make that wheel a lot better, but then you're not really making a web site for Joe Blo anymore, but your own business while aiming to compete with the likes of Wix. If that's what you want to do, then good luck! Hell, what do I know, maybe there's a niche they still haven't covered!

And then we're down to economics and what kind of target group you have in mind.

If you're having small scale business as your primary customers, then it does not make sense to build something from scratch. It's been done to death, and there are already a thousand existing solutions for it, and most of them are actually GOOD.

But if you're either building something for yourself, or you've got BIG customers who needs custom solutions, then you might wanna build that from scratch. With good documentation on top. But not otherwise.

Here's a suggestion for new developers:

Learn how the automated stuff works first. Find out what they're good at and what they're bad at.

Then find customers. Many customers.

Soon enough you'll find that one customer who wants custom stuff that your WYSIWYG magic wand site builder cannot handle. Not even with a plugin (and there are many and they are GOOD).

That's when you might wanna look into building a site from scratch. But not before. But really, at that point, you don't want to be alone either. To get in the really big doors, you have to know people. That's what the really smart people do at Uni. They get to know people, so they can hire them later. Then they get to know big customers and politicians. That's how they get big contracts. Not necessarily in that order. So do you still want to learn coding? Or do you want to earn money?
 
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Jerma

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Thank you for the entertainment!

The second line tripped my bs detector, even before the bad arguments.
Stop.

Your trying to take a shortcut. You look like a money chaser.

You didn't say, "You are chasing money", you said, "You look like a money chaser". That's your hook. When I read that, I thought, "Why should I give a shit about how I look?".

I think that's a pretty widespread problem. If you are always thinking about how other people perceive you, you might start doing dumb things that looks good instead of focusing on what works.
 
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Alin Farah

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My opinion on this is using a site like Wordpress to build your website is a good way to implement the first version of your idea. Since the goal is to convert your Idea into an execution and process and get it out there in the market. It could be seen as an MVP or an alpha test to see what works, what doesn't and fix accordingly. However learning HTML,JS AND CSS whilst building your website is essential as the goal is to build a customized site from scratch because at the end of the day using sites like WordPress defies the Commandment of Control, as you mentioned "What happens if their servers crash" and etc.

So that being said I slightly disagree when mentioning it being a "shortcut" or a "money chasing" motive, as I think using sites like WordPress would be sufficient to get started and test. With the intention of leaving it and building your own website or hire someone to do so, once enough data is gathered from the market such as complaints of void and etc.
 

TKLyte

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Stop.

Your trying to take a shortcut. You look like a money chaser.

Rather than learn how to engineer and build your online presence you would give control to CMS builders that generate bad html and seo structure and host your web services for you.

What happens if their servers crash?

What happens when they raise their hosting prices?

Do you think search engines GAF what your website looks like?

You have no say in the matter. Did these CMS systems make people money once upon a time? Yeah the first ones to use it.

Now these systems have saturated the market and now its really hard to make something that's exceptional.

Use common sense too. Do you think Amazon was created with these systems? Do you think this forum was created with these systems? Do you think IMDb was created with these systems?

Absolutely not. Because the owners of these businesses and domains knew that professional skillsets couldn't be replicated with a few drag and drops.

Stop trying to get rich easy. Hire a developer or learn to code yourself.
By far the worst piece of advice I've seen on this forum. This is total bullshit and not worth a minute of anyone's time. Too bad I already wasted my minute.
 

theguy22

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Telling everyone who wants to have a website that they should learn to code or hire a developer. That's nonsense. And I run a custom development / SEO shop.

Telling people to avoid wix? That's something I agree with. But not for the reasons you laid out. Simply because there are better options on the market for everything wix tries to do.



To whom? How many people even notice if it's a wix or squarespace or WordPress site?

I could go on, but Charnell already dissected the post, and you don't want to hear it, so why bother...

Exactly, or there is no time to code your every website.
To build a website with WordPress it takes 1 day, how long it takes to build the website from scratch?

Wow.

This is bad on so many levels. Would you code each and every website for a client? If yes, learn full stack development for years, build a website from scratch (which would take a long time as well). OR you could take the easy approach: learn webflow/wordpress/wix -- get good enough at building basic websites using those tools -- speed-up your process.

I'm not saying learning those would be easy, it just takes a lot less time than learning how to code.

It's funny how many programmers circle jerk over WordPress vs. custom built websites. WordPress or any other CMS as a base for your project can be amazing tool for both you and the client. You can leverage the readiness of various plugins so you can bring the solution to the client quicker and cheaper and they will never have the trouble of editing anything on their end (if you don't maintain it), because there are literally millions of guides on the Internet.

Literally no one cares about custom code except those miserable programmers that are somehow trying to glorify their cUsToM cOdEd project. Get over yourself. Businesses are looking to solve their BUSINESS goals, not trying to get a custom website where you can drool over your clean, hand-written code.

Just on another note, these comments have left me confused as I'm someone who is learning how to code (specifically Web Dev) on the side. I've spent the past month learning HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, etc, through an online bootcamp. If websites can be made much easily using Wix/WordPress, am I wasting my time? I thought I was learning something that would be useful?
 
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Charnell

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Just on another note, these comments have left me confused as I'm someone who is learning how to code (specifically Web Dev) on the side. I've spent the past month learning HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, etc, through an online bootcamp. If websites can be made much easily using Wix/WordPress, am I wasting my time? I thought I was learning something that would be useful?
What is your reason for learning web development? Are you planning on your income coming from designing & developing websites?

I have a number of websites I run, but I'm not a web developer. Everything I know about CSS I learned when I needed it, nothing more. The website isn't the business, it's just the medium for marketing.

If you're making something special, web dev makes sense. If not, most blogs or e-commerce stores can be improved out of the box with a 5-pixel rounded border & drop shadow on images.
 

Two Dog

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Just on another note, these comments have left me confused as I'm someone who is learning how to code (specifically Web Dev) on the side. I've spent the past month learning HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, etc, through an online bootcamp. If websites can be made much easily using Wix/WordPress, am I wasting my time? I thought I was learning something that would be useful?
*** I don't understand how this thread is so popular. Everyone is being trolled. Let the OP code websites in Fortran.

Web Development isn't about putting up clones of easily deployed WP sites. If that's your business model for making money, it's going to a really long slog of disappointment. Did you complete the bootcamp to get a coding job or to start a software business???

Jobs will typically be writing code to meet design specifications, fulfill client requests or maintain/expand an existing code base. Starting a software business could be creating custom applications for clients, taking on work as a independent contractor, developing web applications, creating plug-ins for WP or making tools to help people sell more effectively with Shopify, Amazon, etc.

I thought I was learning something that would be useful?
The OPs stupid rant was mocking people for using wildly popular free platforms instead of paying $$$ for custom development. Coding is useful when you're reasonably good at it. If you're not, use what you're learning to hire, partner or outsource to better developers or move into project management, product marketing, tech support, sales, whatever.
 

BizyDad

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What is your reason for learning web development? Are you planning on your income coming from designing & developing websites?
If I had a nickle for every time you take the words out of my mouth...

...I'd have at least a dozen nickles.
 

Ivan Koretskyy

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Sir, just use this statement for everything.

“It doesn’t matter how you get there, people care about results”

Yes it’s important to get the most control, but if getting it done 100x faster means giving up some control then I’m up for it.

You should might as well build your own computer from scratch, go to the forest or whatever and harvest some material to build your new graphics card because with your logic you don’t have control when Nvidia changes something.
 

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