When you begin freelance work for individuals and companies, you first have to decide your workflow and the ways you interact with your clients. Making sure you have good contact between the client and you is half the battle. The other half is deciding how you want to create and develop the client’s website. The first approach is hand coding a website with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other necessary backend languages. This takes a longer time and can keep your clients waiting, especially if they need their website up and running quickly. Another approach that has become more common is utilizing website builders. They make website creation more efficient and less time costly, allowing a website to be quickly designed and deployed. In this blog post I will talk about each method, their pros and cons, and provide my opinion at the end.
How The Classic Method Came To Be
In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee created the web while working at CERN. It was pivotal towards the digital revolution. After the World Wide Web was created, HTML was invented in 1991 and quickly became the standard for making webpages across the World Wide Web and was updated through the years to meet modern web standards. Along with CSS and JavaScript, it became the classical approach to making websites.
Hand Coding Websites: Absolute Control
Lots of freelance developers still prefer to hand code their websites, and that’s not surprising as it provides you with more control and design freedom. Developers get to know the website in and out, their code, and what’s going into the website. It’s not curtained behind a company keeping the code secret. Being able to access the code yourself gives greater control and allows you to implement specific features more precisely.
Problems and Solutions For Hand Coded Website Issues
Once you begin a hand coded website project, overtime it will become harder to maintain and the process can become more tedious without structure. This is where JavaScript frameworks come into play. JavaScript frameworks speed up development and come with a host of built in features to make your life easier when programming. Frameworks provide structure, so that when your website grows, it makes it easier to maintain overtime. Frameworks also have some downsides as well. One is encountering a steeper learning curve, especially for beginner developers. Frameworks commonly rely on dependencies and keeping track of updates can become difficult causing issues later on. For simpler websites, frameworks aren’t often needed and will over complicate the process.
As well as the complexity of frameworks, cost can also become advanced since you need different third party tools to make certain components work such as APIs, servers/hosting, and database storage. Trying to present these components and each of their costs can get confusing as it’s not bundled all together, you have to branch out to different services.
In conclusion, hand coding websites is still popular and provides control over styling, as well as code that isn’t hidden and able to be accessed with ease. This gives developers control over specific features they’re looking to implement. However, some downsides toward this method are maintainability, time efficiency, and individual component pricing.
Website Builders: The Most Efficient Way
Now, let’s move onto website builders. Website builders have become popular for being able to quickly build and deploy websites. Website builders are no-code environments, instead they utilize drag and drop elements to add to your site. These elements are easy to style and saves you the time of having to type out and specify each style in CSS.
Website builders are great for beginners for a couple of reasons. One, users need no previous programming experience making it that more accessible to beginners. Secondly, maintenance is easy as well since everything is mostly UI, users are able to navigate around easier and find the tools you need. Cost wise, you can more easily present to your client the pricing plans the builder has and allow your client to see the features provided by each plan. It’s bundled and isn’t a headache like paying for individual components via different services, it keeps it all on one platform.
What Website Builders Are There?
There are many different website builders available, and each one suits a different type of person. If you want to make websites with ease and deploy them quickly, website builders like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify are the best option. If you’re more advanced, but not to the point that you’re comfortable hand coding, website builders like Framer, Webflow, and WordPress are great choices. Most of these website builders have begun implementing AI features that can further boost your productivity.
In conclusion website builders have grown in popularity, especially for freelancers who have clients that need a website created and deployed quickly. It doesn’t take as much time, and doesn’t keep the client waiting. Less confusion is presented when everything stays on one platform.
Wrapping Up and My Opinion
This blog has covered a lot, and I want to wrap up by talking about my opinion. I prefer hand coding websites, as I’ve been doing it for a long time and am comfortable with the environment I put myself in each time I begin a new project. I never really got around to exploring website builders besides hosting with WordPress and using Elementor Builder Plugin. I like having control over styling and features I want to specifically implement. I feel that the website comes out better when I’m able to fine tune areas of design that might be a bit off to me.
It’s All About Preference
At the end of the day however, each person is different whether they’re a client, freelancer, or developer. It’s based on preference and what the user is looking for. Each user will find their own unique solution and there are no pros and cons until you explore. I hope this blog has helped and I wish you luck in your website creation journey.
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