I’d think a real developer would know how to best allocate their time. If a standard WordPress blog gets the job done, spending tens to hundreds of hours custom building your site when the purpose is the content, not the site itself, it seem like time not well spent.
This is the deep in my gut feeling I’m getting as well. I’m trying to be objective and possibly accept that perhaps I’m just getting older, but good god, this seems like a massive waste of time for what is essentially a wordpress site lol.
I completely agree with you, when all you want is to display basic content WordPress is a great tool (+1 for Hugo suggestion from
thesimon). However my personal experience with WordPress for larger project isn't as great.
More and more businesses want interactions, fast navigation, etc. which are easier to deliver with progressive web apps than traditional websites that's why I choose this custom and more time consuming solution.
All that work, and you still need to manually generate proper meta tags and structured data for SEO—and then add custom functionality for editing that in contentful. And then the client’s marketing team realizes they need AMP support, so you have to manually build that since most static site generators aren’t designed for that. And then the client sees a competitor has ESP integration in their Wordpress admin and can send newsletters in the same place they publish content—-so you have to custom build that. And then the client suddenly needs to add payment integration and e-commerce capabilities. And then they need to generate one-off marketing landing pages without needing to call you. And so on.
And then 300 hours later you realize that the entire static site ecosystem is designed for developer pleasure, instead of the needs of real businesses. And after you add the things real businesses need, you kinda just wasted months recreating Wordpress. And you realize you probably should have just used Wordpress.
[this has been my realization over the past couple of years trying to shoehorn clients into static sites]
Thank you for your feedback, I do agree with you on most points: this solution can't and isn't meant to replace what a fully-fledged WordPress can offer you. However, I trust that assembling smaller single propose pieces of software can offer just as many functionalities with better control over what's happening.
By the way, with this solution an AMP support isn't required as you can serve the same content to mobile users, leaving most of the heavy work to the CMS to optimize the assets (images for a classic example).
While I'm certainly glad people seem to be remembering the benefits of server rendered websites, the fact that this "renaissance" is powered by client side frameworks still feels... odd.
I'm down with using a CMS. Our company is driven by a completely custom-developed data and background processing pipeline, yet our public website is in Wordpress, because it's the best solution for the stakeholders that need to manage that website.
There's a lot going wrong with that headline. I didn't really see "showcase websites" being highlighted either. It's a decent tutorial on Contentful, Nuxt, and Netlify, but I feel like the title is trying to deliver something else.
