I recently dipped my toes into the React/Next.js waters for the first time to build a little personal project. I wrote about how I used AI to help me with that recently, and I'll do another post about the project in more depth soon. For this post though, I wanted to write about a few of the gotchyas I encountered while working on the project that I thought it might be useful to document in case others run into similar problems.

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Well, not really. But it's all about click-baity headlines these days, isn't it? So while, yes, this article will be about AI, it's not going to be about food, but about code (sorry sandwich afionados).

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If you're a conscientious web developer you make sure when you update static assets, like CSS and javascript, that your site forces a visitor to download a fresh copy with the updated code in it. This is otherwise known as cache-busting.

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On quite a few projects recently I've been using a front-end tooling approach as described in the excellent article by Andrew Welch of nystudio107, A Gulp Workflow for Frontend Development Automation. I first got drawn to it because I've also been using Tailwind for most of my recent work, and found that Andrew has a repo for a Craft CMS scaffolding project on Github which is aso set up to use Tailwind.

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Since I first wrote a review of Processwire more than six years ago, I've gone on to be an active user of the CMS and have used it on quite a few sites over the years. If you do a search for favourite your-preferred-cms plugins/modules/add-ons, you'll get a lot of results, but there doesn't appear to be anything that's been written for Processwire, other than a forum thread which is a few years old now.

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It's only taken four and a bit years, but I finally got around to updating ExpressionEngine on this site. The site was running 2.11.9 and it's now on the latest version, 5.2.4. The main reason for the upgrade was because the way I had been dealing with images and code in blog posts wasn't ideal, it wasn't very flexible or user-friendly when creating content, and on the front end, the output wasn't responsive enough.

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Haven't heard of Local by Flywheel? It's a web development tool for managing server environments that was designed to be used with Wordpress, but can easily be used for Craft, ExpressionEngine, Processwire or any Content Management System (CMS).

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I am often asked: "How much does a website cost?" And the response is usually along the lines of, "There's no one single answer to that question, it will depend on what you want, and it will vary from one project to the next."

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So you're in the market for some creative services, whether it be a new or redesigned website, a marketing strategy, advertising or printed material. You may also have an idea about what sort of options you have to choose from: you could choose a creative agency or studio, or a freelancer.

But what exactly is the difference between the two?

One versus many?

On the surface it might seem obvious: an agency or studio is a group of people, whereas a freelancer is just one. With the agency you would have a group of specialists in different fields, and with the freelancer you'd have an all-rounder who may be good at lots of things, but not an expert in any one. But in reality, the two maybe closer together than you might think.

Quite often an agency is run by the principal / founder / director but the rest of the staff are themselves freelancers who are brought in to work on different parts of the project. There might be a writer, a marketer, a graphic designer, and a web developer who may all work together on a project. Different projects will have different requirements so the agency principal would need a network of professionals in different fields to call on.

It's at this point that you find that an agency may not be that much different from a freelancer. A freelancer can't be expected to know and do everything, because it's just one person. So any good freelancer would also have a network of professionals in other creative fields that they can call on to help them with parts of projects that they can't do themselves.

A question of perception

The main difference between the agency and the freelancer would be in how each is presented and the language used in their promotional material. One is presenting as a group, the other as an individual, but the services provided can often be almost identical.

Now of course, not all agencies are like what I've just described: some will have a whole group of full-time staff who work either remotely or have their own premises. But again, the type of work they do is probably not much different from that of the agency who works with a network of freelancers, or the freelancer who also has their own network to call on.

The main difference here is likely to be the volume of work they can produce. An agency employing lots of staff may have multiple project managers on their team which means they can manage more projects simultaneously, whereas a solo-run agency and a freelancer may be undertaking the project management themselves, as well as handling some aspects of the creative work.

Having only a single project manager limits the number of projects that can run concurrently, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It means the same level of attention and care can be directed towards each project, whereas agencies with a large number of projects might find their attention split, their focus less concentrated.

They all want the same thing

And that is, they all want what you want. You've come with a problem and both agencies and freelancers want to solve it. How they achieve the end result might vary, but ultimately it's all about the result you're trying to achieve.

Having said that, it's a well known maxim that the journey is often more important than the destination. Yes, you want the expected result, but if getting to the result is a painful process, it may take some of the gloss off the result, or it may negate the success of the result altogether.

To ensure the journey is as successful as the result will depend on who you choose to accompany you on that journey, and I'll talk about a bit more about that in my next post on how to choose a freelance web developer.

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The claims sound great: "Create your stunning website. It's free." "Create a Free Website, Online Store, or Blog." "A simple & elegant website builder (and it's free)." And given that this is a blog about web design and development, and these sorts of companies are in direct competition with us, you might be thinking that all I'm trying to do is run down the competition to make us look better.

But if that was the case, I probably would've done this a long time ago. The only reason I'm writing this now is because the number of problems I've seen on sites built with these free website builder platforms has reached a tipping point where I feel I really need to say something to prevent people who might be considering using one making what will ultimately be an expensive mistake.

Because what these website builder platforms don't tell you is that…

They're terrible for SEO

SEO, search engine optimisation, the process of making sure your site can be found in search engines when people type in keywords relating to your business.

Basically if you build your site with one of these platforms, you can pretty much forget about anyone ever finding you via a search engine.

The only way they'll find your site is if they already know your domain or do a search on the business name itself. Which isn't much use if you're trying to attract customers who may not know about you yet.

To be fair, the SEO problems these sites have are only partly the fault of the platform itself; the other part is that the people creating the sites don't know what they don't know, and so miss out some crucial steps. The sort of things that someone who does web design/development for a living wouldn't forget.

Nowhere to be found in search results

To give some examples of the sort of problems I've encountered:

• Doing a search for a local takeaway recently I searched for "Business Name Suburb Name". I could find a link to their Facebook page but their own site appeared nowhere in the results.
• Last year I rebuilt a site whose business name was so unique that a link to its site should've come up in first place in search engine results. Before, when the site was powered by a free website builder service, it appeared nowhere. After moving it off that service, it is now at #1 as it should be.
• If you were to take a random sentence from any website and paste it into the search field of a search engine wrapped in quote marks, e.g. "this is the phrase I'm searching for", you should get a link to the page you just copied it from. For one of these particular website builders, that doesn't happen. That means sites on this platform are pretty much invisible to search queries. In one example I looked at recently, I did the above test and got several results to other sites where the business has created profiles, but a link to their own site which had the same piece of text was nowhere to be found.

If you read through the promotional copy on some of these sites, they will try to persuade you that they do have all the SEO bases covered, but in my experience of them from sites actually live on the Internet, those claims just don't stack up.

More and more we're being approached by people who have started out using a free website builder but want to get their site rebuilt because of poor search engine performance.

The cost is…?

For some, being found in search engine results isn't a priority, they view their website as an extension of their business card, something to display extended information about their business for people who already know about them.

But those are in the minority. Most businesses want to attract new customers who may know what product or service they want, but don't know of the business itself.

So while it may not cost you anything to set up a site on a free website builder initially (other than your own time), the cost is that you're potentially losing business if no-one finds your site. And if you're spending time on an on-going basis updating the site, if no-one ever sees it, that's time wasted.

So if you're a business owner who already has a site built on one of these platforms that's not performing, or you're considering using one but would like to talk about alternatives, drop us a line.

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