Are DIY Website Builders Hurting Freelancers?

When I first started freelancing, Wix was making its big marketing push, advertising themselves as the DIY solution for small businesses. A little part of me wondered if I had chosen the wrong career to switch to and was joining a dying profession. People on the outside and even new freelancers just starting tend to only see a single small segment of the web development -- the web designer for Mom and Pop shops,and that is the exact market segment that products like Wix & Squarespace target, so its natural to see them as a threat to the freelance web designers that make their living in that market.
The thing that I think gets overlooked however is that DIY website options have always been available. Before there was Wix and Squarespace there was Geocities and Frontpage. Now days we have a multitude of DIY tools, ranging from the "wizard" kind (like Squarespace & Wix), where you stick your content and photos into a pre-made theme, and out comes a website, to more fine-grained, semi-professional tools like Adobe Muse, or Webflow. Regardless there has always been room for both Freelancers and DIY web tools, because most of the time we operate in different market segments.
There are two kinds of DIY tools out there: The first kind are ones that lock you into their platform or their way of doing things, like Wix, Squarespace, and to a certain extent, Adobe Muse. This kind is truly aimed at DIY'ers who have little or not budget to hire a developer, and just want a small simple website, and have no need in the future to expand their site's capabilities beyond what the platform can offer. I actually think its amazing that tools are available for the layman to produce a decent looking website on their own if they don't mind spending some time figuring it out, and that doesn't bother my ability to get work either because those people aren't and never were, my target market. They can't hold a candle to the value a professionally designed website is able to bring to the table, but sometimes that's just not feasible for someone who just wants a space online to hang their shingle or sell their knick knacks.
The other kind, what I call the semi-professional tool, aims to help you produce code without having to actually write code, like Webflow. These ones are good in that they don't lock you into the platform because they generate code that can be then handed off to another developer to extended as needed. The learning curve is much higher however, and typically don't do much to help the user with styling and designing the website, so without prior design experience, it can be difficult to produce a good looking website. They're also really just front-end tools, because since they just spit out code, they can't offer any back-end capability like database integration or content management.
The fact that these tools exists shouldn't hurt a good freelance developer in either case, because as professionals, clients usually hire us for the whole package -- knowing how to convey a message through design, layout, coding, and content, and also knowing how to implement that into a live working website that performs well, and is built in a way that minimizes future maintenance, and allows for additional functionality to added onto it without having to start over. For now, there's no DIY tool out there can do that. And if there ever is one, well, it will need to be built by a developer who can code.
Categories: General, Freelancing Tips,