Web Design vs Wix vs Wordpress vs Shopify?

hey guys welcome to the vlog so let's talk about web design 2018 a question that I get every so often is whether or not Web Design as a profession is at risk because of tools like Wix web building tools like Wix Squarespace tools like Shopify are these tools going to make web design obsolete because they look pretty easy to use and you can create some pretty good-looking sites short answer is no because you have to look at these things as being tools period yes for very simple sites any small non-trained non-professional could get in there and build something it's very basic but there's much more to web design today than just doing a layout much more than that you'd be surprised of how many business owners small business owners have no ability to see and layout things even with the tool like Wix you kind of think of it like a race car you can give an average person a race car does that mean they're gonna be able to drive it on a track well chances are not very likely let me get into this a little bit more web design goes through changes every so often and these changes are driven by technology so back in 1994 when I started building websites everything was hand coding then the programs came out the web design programs came out like front-page hot dog Dreamweaver later on etc etc and they changed the way we used to build sites and that went on for a couple years because of limitation of technologies in terms of the coding languages people would make made heavy use of programs photo editing programs like Photoshop CorelDraw whatever in their web design the web design toolset in the 1990s was very different from where they are today or even where they were in the early 2000s I remember a friend of mine who had been a professional web designer webmaster as we would call them back then and he stepped away from the web design world for about three years to three years and when he came back he found out but it was totally changed the way we would look at things the way we would apply the technologies was totally totally changed one of the major changes was that the use of Photoshop had diminished quite a bit back in the late 90s early 90s using Photoshop was a huge part of the process to fast forward to 2003 and 4 totally changed the use of Photoshop became at best secondary and in fact today say you don't really need hardly any Photoshop skills to be a successful web professional web designer today that's another story so in comes the early 2000s you have this migration to CSS based layout the whole game changes again back in those days around that time give it a couple years WordPress came about and other content management systems you install it on the server boom a bone you apply template and then you want to generate a new page it's just like using a lose the week which you see what you get type of app and Bob's your uncle where you go and web designers were freaking out oh my no no no abused WordPress we won't have any more work we won't build all these pages well what happened was that yes certain jobs that a web designer did in the 90s got replaced with even more complex jobs in certain respects that you did with WordPress so you had this growth of the WordPress professional the WordPress ecosystem with the themes and the plugins and the templates the installations and a maintenance in the update and now today 35% of websites are give or take are powered by WordPress added another CMS this you're looking at you know maybe close to 40% of the websites or CMS based and that makes sense CMS's are good but it hasn't taken away from the utility of web designers it's just that their roles the jobs that the web designer did changed quite a bit fast-forward to today you have web builders like wakes you got ecommerce platforms like Shopify and people are wondering um all know is that going to replace web designers as well again the web professional web designer is kind of an old-school term today I think web professional or front-end developer might be better but even front-end developers kind of a specialization you see web design the whole process of putting a site on the web there's different ways to approach it you can use web builder like a Wix or Squarespace you can use a Shopify you can go traditional you can go WordPress your go Drupal all these things are viable and depending on the nature of the job at hand you can use one or the other so to answer a burning question a lot of newb web designers or aspiring web designers or front-end developers have will these tools make web design obsolete no it's just going to shift the way web designers work and the type of skills that they bring to the table in fact guess what there are jobs for professional Wix developers believe it or not there are jobs for professional Shopify developers of course there's tons of work for WordPress professionals as well so it's just there is just a shift in the skill sets required for a web developer web that web developer a web designer web professional beyond the mechanics of getting a site up in terms of the layout and so forth there's all these other things that come into it search engine optimization strategy web marketing strategy setting up just the whole process getting the site up online how do you get video going now you can do these certain amount of these things with a tool like Wix and stuff but typically what you're going to find with builders like that web builders is that they work fine with a very narrow track just a very narrow and you go out that track you got all kinds of problems and evidence of that is that wicks has opened up its its toolset using javascript of course he and so VAT if you really wanted to master wicks you got to know your JavaScript wealth what business owner is gonna know that so the fact that you have people posting jobs and I'll do this in another video for Wix developers or Wix designers tells you something about Wix tells you something about the profession again whether you do from scratch whether you go for CMS like WordPress or Drupal whether you go for Squarespace as a starting point and build off of that all these tools are still still require a certain amount of knowledge in terms of the web and the coding and so forth so again I don't see these things as a threat I just see CV sings as power tools if you will to help speed up the process trust me back in the old days we used to have to spend a huge amount of time tweaking tweaking images making sure they were compressed properly so they look they loaded in a reasonable amount of time a huge amount of work had to be done really is teeth pulling work we don't have to do that anymore thank you thank the Nerds for that one thank the nurse for that one so if a tool like a Wix or a Shopify simplifies a process to implement a cart or influence it to implement the basic structure that's cool that's fine you're gonna they're gonna hire people web professionals like you potentially to put that into place because business owners they don't know they don't know when should I use Wix or you Squarespace how do I use it what do we do how do I get video what I do for my social strategy how about the SEO how did I get it on how do I get my site ranking what kind of layout do you think I should use given the type of business these are all things that weeks can't answer these are things but our web professional will bring to the table so again all this said you still need your basics always a fundamentals again if you know your html5 your sister 3 or JavaScript and you understand the fundamentals of web design and development and so forth all these tools become much easier to use and you'd be you'd be much more productive with them if you understand proper layout properly usability they call that UX you know and UI again you need that training that I to know what what to do where to place sakes Wix can help automate the process like a power tool can help you automate the process of building a table or something but just because you have the power tools to build and cut the wood and etc terrible you still need the skills put it all together so it looks pretty good just with these builders whether it be WordPress or whether it be wicks or Shopify they just speed the process up that's all so I wouldn't worry too much about it cheers guys in fact in one of the businesses I'm involved with it I can't go into too much detail but it is basically in the the Airbnb space and so we were looking at a web app where we had to build something that was required a bunch of a bunch of complexity so I said I would looked at it as a CTO of this particular business I looked at it and I made the decision to not spend the hundred thousand dollars it would be required to build the application from scratch I found the SAS software as a service that pretty much did everything that we needed at least one part of the business and we paid our licensing fee there and then for other parts of the business in terms of the website the web presence I used in this case we decided to use WordPress again there were reasons for that now I had the skills I have people work for me about the town we could have built these things from scratch but it was not required so we use third-party tools as any smart web professional do now still I was able to make these decisions and make these judgments because of my background as a developer and of course a business owner and so my role as CTO was very important where's my the two partners involved with this like two other partners they have some technical skills but not very much so they depended on my judgment to make these decisions otherwise they'd be running around for a long time and in fact and I have other people I know or who have businesses because they don't have a proper CTO they call me up or down now and then asking questions about things because they just don't know what to do what you know could be simply should we use WordPress or use Drupal shouldn't go from scratch you may build from scratch what do we do what do we do is should we use this platform at they don't have any way to judge that's where web professional comes in I hope that story gives you some insight in terms of how the real world looks so again don't see these tools as threats see them as just new tools that will make your job a little easier in certain areas and if you learn to embrace understand these tools and how to use them properly you're just going to be a much more successful web professional that's all bye-bye

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 46,887

Rating: 4.9236536 out of 5

Keywords: wix vs web design, web design vs wix, squarespace or web design, wordpress vs wix

Id: rKnJS0OfJng

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018