Free Website Builders Taking Our Work?

On one side: yes, they're taking work away from developers and designers. On the other hand: no. A lot of people will find out that a website built with e.g. Wix will not show up very highly in Google search results and it's a lot harder to get something that both you and you're users like.

Plus, the people who use those "builders" want to have their cake and eat it too. They can do this, but they won't get quality work and eventually they'll turn to true craftsmen. And those who don't, you wouldn't want to work them anyway since they don't respect "us" as a craft.

If they are stealing our work, it is on the lower end of the pay scale. In my experience, the potential clients that came my way and went with a website builder instead did so to save a few bucks. They cater to those whom typically wouldn't spend enough money for a developer to break even on. And even still, they are just tools. Just because someone decides to create their website on Squarespace doesn't mean that they'll know how to. I've helped get a site up and running on a website builder before and the little fees you can charge for doing so bring in more profit than designing/developing a website for them would have. I guess I'd rather just make a couple hundred for a couple hours of setting up a site on Squarespace for someone than I would make $1,500 and not make or lose that anyway once it is all said and done.

Who doesn't want to go cheap? Building a service that provides a user with a modular website with side of good taste is the best way to go. On the other hand, if you go with services like Squarespace you will have this feeling inside that everyone in the world has the opportunity to copy your "built" website with a few customizations without the satisfactory feeling of having a website customly designed just for you.

In short Yes, they are taking the work of Web Designers. Website Builders have been around for almost a decade, but I thought they were taking the work or clients most Web Designer's didn't want. I guess they scaled - I was shocked to find that Wix.com was now a billion-dollar valued public company (NASDAQ:WIX)! Well now they have 40 MILLION users with 650K paid accounts and 550 employees. I guess their technology makes it possible for them able to handle support for millions of clients, unlike a lone Web Designer or small shop. I guess now legitimate clients are choosing website builders because they seem like the holy grail of cheap, quick and good. I wonder if there are many designers who fit website builders into their workflow where they "assist" clients in building a site.

Squarespace (1.8 Million users) is one of the best-designed online wysiwyg editors if have seen but they are going for volume customers with a budget of about $200/yr. There are lots of up sells on website builders (i.e. customization, e-commerce, mobile etc.) but it would be hard to compete on price there and i'm sure the support costs alone are huge.

Weebly (15 Million users) here is a Y Combinator company that has been around since 2007! I don't know what the business model is but again they are going after a monthly client which is happy to spend their time figuring it out themselves.

Many of these web builders are here because these clients needed a low-budget option. I feel it's still low-budget but no longer low quality. I'm sure Facebook pages and Etsy.com have eliminated some e-commerce website projects - but it feels like a community so that's better. A weapon I think Shopify.com is using to compete with bigger Magento.com for the e-commerce crown.

It used to be that I thought templates were designed to be pixel-perfect by designers/developers that had free time. I remember when templatemonster.com launched and was worried it would hurt the design industry - now you have them selling templates for Wix, Bootstrap, WooThemes, Shopify etc. And you have designers actively designing templates for instead of doing one-off client work because selling a template to Theme Forest can creative reoccurring revenue - without the hassle of finding clients. For some websites it's easier to have the client pick the template and you (or they) make some adjustments and launch.

I think there is value in learning logo design just because 99designs.com exists or learning web design because Wix went public (and losing $2.5M/month btw). Web Design is fun and can open up a whole world of digital design. Your design skills are needed now and in the future for new web-enabled devices, no-touch glass interfaces, projected interfaces on car windshields etc... After all, design is not just how it looks.

Hey Tony, thank you for you input. You have really given me some great incite and information. I also forgot all about the world of designing and selling templates to these companies.

I sure hope they don't take enough jobs to prevent me from finding work!

Why not have the best of both worlds? Simply make a "website building" service, with a pricing plan and have an option to make a customized website of your liking with another pricing plan. If there was a company like this. That company, hypothetically, would hire designers for their custom design sector, and would hire programers to make the "website building" service with mediocre to premium designs. Simple. :)

Well don't forget angelfire.com and geocities.com, they were huge back in the 90's. Haha, hell they got me involved in web development.

In my opinion though, they aren't taking away business from web developers/designer. I am honestly glad they exist, a lot of those companies raise awareness to the web industry and could create more interest for newcomers, who want to make web development a full-time career. They also weed out the clients who aren't serious about the importance of their web presence and who aren't willing to/can afford to spend the money either.

No single business owner (not trained in web development) should be able to compare to someone who has spent a good portion of their life/career studying and training how to create for the web. I guarantee that if you took what you learned here (or elsewhere) and create a similar website to someone who is using one of those services, your conversion rates, traffic, and overall user experience should all trump the free service website.

I will however say that some theme forest templates are nicely coded, and look good. You could even run an entire business off of purchasing and customizing templates. However, this still requires knowledge of the industry as a whole, it doesn't matter if you're capable of customizing HTML/PHP/Wordpress/JS (whatever it is that you need). There are still a list of standards that you should follow, and only someone who has dedicated a large sum of time to learning those standards will produce a better quality project.

Additionally, there are a lot of concepts that are often overlooked by these services, like server performance, search engine optimization, and accessibility (ADA). This begins to get a lot more complicated if you start messing with pre-configured templates/websites without any prior knowledge on the subject.

Overall I'm not concerned about these services, because I'm confident that I am (we are) an important asset to companies that want the best results.

I recently finished my studies(for now at least) and as I was starting off in my new position I was asked to "make a website", given that I had zero knowledge about how to actually go about making one I still felt like I could take the oportunity for some extra cash by going for a website builder solution.

Now let me tell you... it was no solution, it was a work-around, if anything the website builders motivated me and made me realize how much more powerful the web could be. As I worked on a couple projects the limitations that these builders had drove me crazy! I wanted to do more, to deliver a product far more impressive than I was able to produce with the builder.

That's the reason I decided to take the leap and learn me some proper Web Skills!! I'm two days into Treehouse and I cant stop going through the library. Most of my clients gave little to no atention to the actual website capabilities, they wanted to "Be on the internet.", but as the industry evolves I am positive that they will start noticing how insanely powerful these applications can get.

Many people dont have the resources to get a professional website and I think we can all agree on that. These website builders are making the web acessible to them and I can only congratulate them for that. If you could share the power of the web with the rest of the world, wouldnt you give it a go?

Pardon me for going a bit off topic:

The builders gave me an immense hunger to know what goes on "backstage" and I'd like to thank Treehouse for this unbelieveble experience I'm just now embarking on. I never realized I could get so motivated about something OR that I could get such a rewarding feeling from a proper education system.

Two days of non-stop browsing through the Treehouse Library and I feel closer to Treehouse teachers than I've ever felt to any other teacher.

Hey Bernardo, I am so pleased to hear that Treehouse is going great for you! i hope you will go through the library and gain the skills that you need to succeed! Treehouse is an amazing tool. I also want to thank you for your insight into the website builder world.

Are there benefits to using a website builder as a development platform, like the Squarespace development platform? Would that allow a client to produce an inexpensive website an increase functionality over time? Is there any benefit in using them as a prototyping tool?

I used weebly for our company website. Weebly had some decent templates and i can customize to a certain degree. Those who can write code can do that on custom html. But you can't have a password protected page for members only on the free service.

Can you recommend a site with free pastword protected ability? We've been using Yahoo Groups and it just doesn't work for us. I have read the good article before like this one http://www.beautifullife.info/web-design/15-best-free-website-builders before But still cant understand something right now.