> There's a good argument to be made that certain social goods are actually better when there is no profit motive for the people providing it.

Can you elaborate on that? I honestly can't see it.

Definitely needed. Nice clean layout, the cleaner the better.

Steve Jobs also said: "If you see a stylus, they blew it." The Newton had a stylus.

I think to terminate the Newton was just Jobs acting according to Jobs' design philosophy. It was his honest opinion.

Give me a billion dollars and I write you a mobile OS. Shoot me an email if you are interested.

Does the billion dollars include indemnification against all patent and copyright lawsuits?

I don't know about the OP, but if you pay me up front my shell company will agree to indemnify you against anything you want. For various reasons, I will not personally be responsible for any of it and I do draw a heft salary because I'm awesome. But if there is any money left over after design meetings in the Bahamas on the corporate yacht, I'm sure there will be lawyers available to take it.

How about third party app development?

>>How much content is actually worth paying for?<<

This is the real question in the pot.

Moore's Law will ensure the cycle will come back. When a smartphonesque device can robustly house your private cloud. At that stage the brick and mortar warehouses will have to offer other solutions than just enabling cloud services.

In the past you piad the printer and mailman for distribution. Now you pay the networks for a "channel."

Guns could seize a warheouse and burn books. Guns can storm a server room and delete files.

Joomla and Drupal think of it like Python and Ruby, in the sense of: the same thing but fundamentally absolutely different. I would say Drupal is better. But it doesn't really matter, either is fine and will get the job done.

If the site is not very big, consider Wordpress. For one reason: the community and with that mainly the pulgins available. For example there are WP plugins that do the whole conversion for mobile for you or do SEO for you. It really depends on what the site should do. But Wordpress can be easily the best solution.

Now, all that is moot, to a level, because all these CMS have nice importerts/exporters, so you cannot really make a big mistake that will sink everything.

If however, the site in question is bigger a site than just "a website", consider Typo3. It's a beast. It's cool. It may not worth the effort for a small shop, but if the site has enough size, try Typo3. Beast!

> and only noticed by the third that has a feel for it.

Everybody feels something. It's just that most people don't realize what it is what they are feeling. But subconsciously they feel a difference. And that diference may (or may not) influence the buying decision.

It’s also interesting that in studies of typographical variations like fonts and line lengths, significant differences have been found in metrics like reading speed and in measured retention, even when the readers either did not realise there was a difference or even subjectively preferred a style that was objectively inferior in some ways. Moreover, while a lot of readers may not notice or distinguish details to the extent that a trained designer would, there are often very clear and consistent patterns in their general preferences.

So while it’s often true that the best typography is “invisible”, that doesn’t mean it has no effect on either the reader’s subconscious perception of the text or on more practical matters like how quickly and accurately they will read it.

PHP in terms of the language syntax and at least a broad familiarity with the most used libs etc?

That's not a career choice, that's just something you can do as a web developer, like HTML and basic CSS.

Question is where you go from there. Another language/stack? Domain knowledge? Projects guy? etc etc