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

[Alin Farah]

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.

Can you elaborate what you mean by the phrase “something special“ because I am currently building an e-commerce peer to peer marketplace on Wordpress.However the plug-ins that I am using do not have the specific function that I need for my business. I am now required to customise the plug-in so I am now learning HTML,CSS,JavaScript and PHP for customizing and combining features from other plugins.

Would you say this is a case of “something special“ as using WordPress is sufficient so far, however it does not fulfill my main business idea at this moment of time. What would you suggest me to do if you have any suggestion?

 

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[Charnell]

Can you elaborate what you mean by the phrase “something special“ because I am currently building an e-commerce peer to peer marketplace on Wordpress.However the plug-ins that I am using do not have the specific function that I need for my business. I am now required to customise the plug-in so I am now learning HTML,CSS,JavaScript and PHP for customizing and combining features from other plugins.

Would you say this is a case of “something special“ as using WordPress is sufficient so far, however it does not fulfill my main business idea at this moment of time. What would you suggest me to do if you have any suggestion?

Really a toss-up. Is it essential to create that specific function? Or will an out-of-the-box multi-vendor marketplace work for now, assuming that's what you're talking about making? Is it really something you need for your business or something you want?

If you have more time than money it makes sense to learn how to make what you need. You'll have that knowledge for the future. Depending on how complex the specific function is it could be much more advantageous to find a dev.

Some would argue that a viable product/service that gets sales is more important. You could spend weeks or months trying to build and configure for nothing.

Everything has an opportunity cost.

 

[Alin Farah]

Really a toss-up. Is it essential to create that specific function? Or will an out-of-the-box multi-vendor marketplace work for now, assuming that's what you're talking about making? Is it really something you need for your business or something you want?

If you have more time than money it makes sense to learn how to make what you need. You'll have that knowledge for the future. Depending on how complex the specific function is it could be much more advantageous to find a dev.

Some would argue that a viable product/service that gets sales is more important. You could spend weeks or months trying to build and configure for nothing.

Everything has an opportunity cost.

In my case this specific function is essential to create as it is the foundation of my unique selling proposition. I am already using a multi-vendor Marketplace system, however this will not be sufficient in this moment of time. So to answer your question, it is something the business needs.

I would say I have more time than money as I happen to be fairly young and I do not have the budget to hire a developer at the moment. I do not mind spending weeks or months on trying to build this even if it results in failure, since it would be a learning curve for me and I will attain skills and experience along the way.

Thank you for your time and I appreciate this advise you have given me.

 

[IronyIsTacky]

Posts like this are why I disagree with the "don't lurk" advice - you gotta hang around and soak a minimum of knowledge in before you start talking all that good shit

 

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[Black_Mamba_427]

I worked for 6 years at my Dads website design/digital marketing company, so I completely understand the angle you're coming from...

but.....

I've also been using Shopify for my business since 2017 and not ONCE have the servers gone down. 24/7 Live Chat with really, really good customer service and their prices have never changed. It's also handled 7 figures of transactions flawlessly, whilst only taking ~1-2% as a payment processing fee and I've never missed a payment.

I think for people starting out, it's an amazing tool at a super affordable price. People don't have to take a risk of investing say £5-20K building a website to see if their idea is successful or not.

For ecommerce sites, hotels/bookings, photography portfolio, blogger type websites - it's great. But yeah, if you want to build something as big as Amazon, or if you are dealing with millions of customers/huge amounts of data, then yeah - a private web agency would be better.

 

[Itizn]

Posts like this are why I disagree with the "don't lurk" advice - you gotta hang around and soak a minimum of knowledge in before you start talking all that good shit

Underrated post

 

[notorious]

lmao this is some of the shittiest posts on this website
yes bro just learn 3+ years worth of CS, design and web development to create your own website with a custom solution and custom servers
or just pay a developer 10k who's probably going to try and swindle your entire budget from you and deliver a mediocre product that's unscalable at best because you can't verify his code

all of that for testing a business idea that you, until now, will have spent zero time on because you were too busy creatng a website

 

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