I am seeing a lot of wix commercials on how people build websites quickly based on templates. Will front end become useless when anyone can make their own website like this? No need for someone like me to sit down and make a webpage/ site by scratch if its already preset.
Any ideas on this? Am i missing anything?
There’s a similar discussion recently:
I’m a developer, and I work with and advise startups. If a prospective client comes to me with a low budget and an idea they could build in Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress.com, or the like, I gladly send them to those sites to build their minimum viable product. If they end up making money, they’ll undoubtedly want a site more purpose-built for their application. Since I saved them money in the beginning, they’re likely to come back to me when they need something more and can afford to pay for it.
Software will continue getting better and will someday be able to build much more complicated sites than it can today, but it will probably never be able to build everything under the sun. Our challenge as developers is to stay ahead of the curve.
This is exactly what I was thinking. This is the way all code works basically. After a certain amount of time, we learn to automate the easy stuff and start focusing on things we couldn’t attain before.
@raddevon That is what i was thinking. You can’t find a website as complicated as Microsoft as a template. I think they are pretty baseline and require more work then they are worth.
@iamknox Only if it is practical. Are we going to limit ourselves with templates? Yes we could do better websites if he didn’t have to build from scratch.
Website builders have always existed, Wix is just the latest one with enough money behind it to pay for TV adverts. Site builders are arguably better now than they were, but they’re not much use for the majority of the work that companies pay web developers for. The market they’re aimed at is not a market most developers ever touch; basic websites of the kind they are designed to create are a commodity product, there hasn’t ever really been any money/jobs in them.
Wix etc are aimed at tiny businesses and organisations, maybe a single person selling things or promoting something they’re interested in. People or organisations that cannot afford to hire someone to do the work for them, and don’t need to. How many websites do you visit regularly that are Wix sites? The answer is going to be none or very close to none. How many websites do you visit regularly that are Squarespace (which is much more flexible and takes significantly more work to set up)? Possibly a very small number. Non-blog WordPress sites (more work again)? A few, but most of the better ones are actually built/maintained by developers. And so on.
Okay, thanks for this info. Do you think we will ever be able to create efficient website creation technology?
Yes or no depending on how you look at it. The more general you make the tool, the more useful it is, and general tools exist: web frameworks. The more constrained you make the tool, the less useful it is, but the easier it is for non-specialised to use: see Wix. You can’t have a tool like Wix which allows the flexibility of a framework, that’s an oxymoron, but it still fits the definition, sorta
It’s ridiculously hard to build useful software that builds software that is generally useful. You can build software that builds very specific software (a very basic website that follows a specific structural pattern would be an example), but once you step outside that zone, the number of options you need to take into account in expands exponentially.
Oh okay. But hey, 100 years ago our technology would of been impossible. Just think of what will become in the next 20 - 30 years. You can counter argue this by saying that we could reach our limit of understanding the world and we can only have so math knowledge of math and science.
Sure, but if you’re talking about “efficient” technology for building a website, a programming language + a framework is extremely efficient, moreso that anything else, it just needs skill to use. If you automate, it becomes easy to make lots of the same website at the cost of a huge lack of flexibility, inefficiency in other areas, and with a big hit on quality. And for very basic web sites this has happened: anyone can make a basic site with very little skill, and has been able to for the last 15-20 years. Crafting a web site can take a lot of design work, which is aesthetic and can’t really be automated. But on the dev side, in most cases, not much work. A web site is just a visual front end for a lot of other stuff
I agree that automated web design will continue to nibble at the low lying fruit (read: cheap) of web dev. It will probably incrementally improve, but then so do the complexity of web sites.
I do wonder if there will come a day that AI will improve to point that it can respond to stated needs well enough that it could write a great, custom built site, fitted exactly to the customer’s needs. But that’s probably a long ways off, both in technology and affordability.
no. cooporations do not use this garbage, only individuals who don’t know a lot about web development. Point being, corporations need web developers, and there are a lot of those out there. just google dev jobs and look at how many companies are looking for people with your skils…
Also make a distinction between web sites and web apps. Most of the times writing a web site from scratch is a waste of everyone’s time. PERIOD
Okay thanks guys, ill keep this in mind 
These site builders can only get you so far. They cater to the mass market and as soon as anything custom is required, they wont cut it. Any kind of serious startup or app is going to need a web developer in some way.
I don’t think there’s anything to worry about As far as jobs being replaced by automation, web developers are a pretty long way down the list. Every business wants to stand out these template sites all look the same.
Instead of making entire websites, what if its just a templates for instance, buttons or stores? These would only require you to add little edits to fit your website/ page. Another example could be how we could incorporate this into paragraphs elements that you can just drag and drop so you don’t have to right <p> all the time and add classes. You can go in and edit what you need. Basically like building your own computer, but going to the store and buying a HDMI cable/ wire or a fan. These are little things you could build with more time, but make it a lot easier and less time used to buy it at a store. You could build better computers, faster.
Now i don’t want it to seem like i’m limiting anyone’s creativity, as the programming world is free for anyone to do what they want (legally). I would never force or limit someone on what they can do. Instead of typing out 1 and 0’s, you right JS or any coding language usable by humans. What can we substitute/ automate programming so we can right more effective code quicker?
This is what a CMS with a layout editor is. It’s what site builders are. That’s how.they work.
It doesn’t work very well as a general solution. Instead of a single website, there are now several complex applications to maintain, including:
They’re all tied into each other, and often changes in one mean changes in the others.
This is not helpful for coders. It is supposed to be helpful for non-coders, but in general (YMMV) these things are always asked for by clients but never actually used. It seems like a good idea at the time, but for anything that isn’t super simple, it’s generally a bad solution. It’s doable, there are hundreds of thousands of examples in the wild
What if they give you the code? Like their is a official google site where you can go on the storefront and use the code they give you. This is just like how they give you fonts.
Its like the computer example i gave before. You don’t have the store at your house, its completely separate and you go out and get what you need when you need it.
There will still be the need for people to maintain the preset websites, and at some point, the simple templates won’t be enough. The owner/site admin will request something that they can’t do.
I’m currently in this situation on two different domains.