No business I know paid "good money" for that. At most they would get a neighbor's kid (one of them being me) to throw together a few html pages. Fancy ones had a PHP visitors counter.
I guess I've never considered mostly static brochure sites the purview of web development or "doing software" of the style referenced by this article. It's more like web design. WordPress, as ill-suited as it is, had already begun the incursion into design that Wix and others continued.
But, displacing static-site designers is a much easier task than displacing developers due to the latter's work with logic, interactions, etc. Back in the 90s webapps were still nascent and just moving past cgi-bin to some extent, but the bar on replacing devs gets higher with each passing year. So, absent a huge leap in tooling or code generation, etc., I see dev roles changing more than going away.
>A web store can now be made in minutes. A news site. A forum. Heck, there are tons of turnkey company intranet solutions...
Well, sure, yet demand for developers remains strong. They're now moving up the complexity chain, working on different problems, etc. And, of course many are integrating with turnkey solutions like some you mentioned. Notice how so many of these "turnkey" solutions offer APIs?
A web store or forum isn't going to differentiate a business to success any more than a snazzy website will. The bar is now higher. The cycle continues.
Exactly this. I work for a company that specializes in helping to scale business websites that have moved past the out of the box limits of things like WooCommerce and Shopify.
We do consulting for new businesses every month that have started with these turnkey solutions which worked great for them, until they grew big enough that the system starts to break and hiccup more and more. For those clients, we provide an extreme amount of value to keep their online machine well oiled and they happily write us that check every month.
I will say though, that often the platforms I mentioned are not the real issue in the chain, but rather other tools and custom code added on top to hastily support some business decision. Shopify is a great example. Awesome core product that is extremely performant, but a lot of the themes and pre-built templates out there are not built to facilitate a rich and performant experience for customers. Shopify will gladly let you serve a 20mb banner video that will make even modern desktops chug to render and it doesn't really affect them at all. It's our job as consultants to come in and show the business where they can optimize to increase their conversion rate. They already have a product people want, otherwise they wouldn't be having scaling issues, so it's nice for us to get quick wins that result in positive outcomes for everyone.
>Exactly this. I work for a company that specializes in helping to scale business websites that have moved past the out of the box limits of things like WooCommerce and Shopify.
Sure, but most of them wont move "past the out of the box limits of things like WooCommerce and Shopify". For the 1 that gets bigger or has special needs and does there would be other 9 that are just fine using those platforms...
And of course WooCommerce and Shopify can always add more customizability and capture those features eventually, so those devs who help companies "move past the out of the box limits of things like WooCommerce and Shopify", become comoditized glorified configurators (or the owner or admin of the company can even do it themselves).
>most of them wont move "past the out of the box limits of things like WooCommerce and Shopify"
Many of those who never move past that phase were likely not candidates for custom development anyway. They'd likely have sold on eBay or Amazon, whereas Shopify offered them the chance to have their own "store".
That is, many who can spend $29/month (or whatever) for a Shopify store wouldn't have been able to spring for $5K or $10K+ to have a custom store built. I would bet that's the overwhelming majority of Shopify customers.
So, arguably, you might even say Shopify helped some companies to get to the place where they can afford custom development.
But, this whole store thing is just a narrow focus anyway WRT the idea of obsoleting devs. There are plenty of more complex/differentiated businesses that have sprung up since e-commerce, and by the time any of those things have been commoditized, there'll be still more to take their place in this ongoing evolution.
Even your local real estate agent or plumber paid for a website...