Are the trends heading towards CMS, making custom obsolete?

[X_Gary_X]

I recently had a meeting with the head of a small business association in a local town. We talked about my career path regarding web design, and he seems to believe I should not be focusing on custom web design. He says the trends are heading more and more towards CMS. He told me his company just paid $25,000 to go from a custom site, to a drupal site.

I was curious to get your experiences and opinions on this issue. Is there a market for custom freelance web designers, and if so, is the competition too flooded as is, to continue pursuing this path, and increasing my skills in this field? The problem is I love making custom, and can't see myself learning and specializing in CMS based programs...unless they are easy to clean-code.

Thanks,
Gary

 

[CaldwellYSR]

Custom sites and CMS sites are not mutually exclusive. You can have a completely custom site built with a cms. I think he means a static site. The thing is you almost have to be able to write a static site to be able to do well with cms. Yeah you could download someone else's template and make a whole site with cms but a good cms developer/designer should be able to make his own templates. So in my opinion you need to be able to build good static sites AND work with CMS. This is a very new opinion to me, a couple months ago I was in the same place as you wondering why to even bother with a CMS but it saves so much time and effort if you have both abilities in your arsenal.

 

[Phreaddee]

from a flexibility and productivity point of view it would be suicide not to at least have one cms in your arsenal.

as caldwell said they are not mutually exclusive, and perhaps it is more static v dynamic. a good cms can take the hard work out for you, plus make it that little bit easier for your client to manage as well.

 

[X_Gary_X]

Are sites like drupal hard to master, if you know how to code, and create your own templates?

 

[CaldwellYSR]

I haven't worked with Drupal but Joomla! and Wordpress have both been easy enough for me. I haven't finished my own template with wp yet. It's a little more involved than Joomla templates. At least it seems that way to me.

 

[Phreaddee]

if your pretty strong with html, css and php and love to get your hands really truly dirty then drupal is the one for you.

 

[Modern_Media]

Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc... (There are hundreds of CMS applications out there)
You can custom design a CMS.

Find what works best for you if you decide to get into it.

My agency uses Joomla! since our clients seemed to like the interface as opposed to Drupal. That's not to say Joomla is better (because each has it's pros and cons), it's just what works for us. Plus, I personally like Joomla! because we have custom modules we built for SEO purposes and we have had great success marketing our clients using it.

I will say that for blogging - Wordpress is one of the best. Some will argue that Wordpress is the easiest to use but again, we're talking about opinions.

You can also decide if you want to go the pre-built template route or build your CMS websites using your own custom templates. There really isn't a right or wrong answer, just what works best for you.

There will always be a market for freelance designers but there are bad freelancers out there who ruin the rep of the good. I personally believe if you want to succeed, you need more than just an individual to produce a quality product. But that's my biased opinion because I work in a group environment.

 

[Webi CMS]

Hi Gary,

We develop a CMS used mostly by web designers and design agencies, so we get to speak with and work with lots of designers, plus we have a fairly good overview of the market and what's required.

I agree with all the replies here, particularly CaldwellYSR, you really need to be able to offer a content managed website option, as the majority of clients these days realise they need a content managed website, and if you can't offer that then you will almost certainly lose out to other designers and agencies who can.

There most likely will still be occasions where just the design is required on its own, but it's so important to regularly update a website, and it doesn't make sense for you to be constantly doing that for a client when there are effective content management systems out there enabling clients to do it themselves.

The one plug I'll say for my company (hope that's ok!), is that we provide all the expertise and support for the content management part, meaning you can continue to just focus on the design and we take care of everything else - which basically means you can continue to do exactly what you want to do (design), but still approach clients with confidence that you can handle any content management or really any programming requirement.

Any other CMS questions, I'll be happy to try to answer (and not just to plug our system!).

 

[Pheno]

As CaldwellYSR says, the two are not mutually exclusive. Using a CMS just means the customer is able to modify the content of their site.

 

[Modern_Media]

I must admit, I'm addicted to CMS because me and my staff can manage and maintain our clients a whole lot easier than with traditional xHTML/CSS building of websites.

What would normally take hours to make changes, we can now make in seconds.

The hardest part of learning a CMS is getting into the mechanics of templating. I made the decision to refuse using pre-built templates and opted to learn how to customize the CMS.
Once you overcome that obstacle, whatever CMS you use will probably be your niche!