Is building a site from scratch dead?

[Pistolero]

Not only is making a website from scratch fun, and adds a whole new level of customization, but coders get paid by the hour. and "tweaking a wordpress theme" doesn't take very long.

[Ann Bedwell]

The others seem to agree with you, so if I may, why are you asking the question? Has someone suggested otherwise?
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[jonbey]

Starting from scratch each time makes no sense. It's like reinventing the wheel everytime you build a car. Using WP as a foundation is sensible too, as WP probably is lowest risk long term wrt future support.

[ReefPlayground]

Made my business site from scratch. That way I know every little code and know what/where/when to tweek things to get specific responses.

Man, but the days of designing one of a kind websites are far gone. I remember my late middle school / early high school days, (late late 90's). Those were the days. I used to make small anime related websites from scratch, back before youtube and podcasts. back when a 5mb video file was unbelievable. Those were the days!

[Kernelpower_Ltd]

It seems to be that this is the case everyone seems to be using custom
cms or off the shelf shopping carts and stuff like webseed / wordpress.

Fair play to everyone who builds a website from scratch it takes alot of doing but could yield great results if done properly and obviously you have a large amount of control over how the site ends up!!

[AlexDawson]

It is an interesting topic though personally I think it’s very hard to come up with a totally unique website design that does not include either inspiration or reworking existing conventions and other 3rd party devices. The first real question is why would you reinvent the wheel, unless you can improve upon an existing model, it makes sense to use a prebuilt CMS rather than create one from scratch (unless you require something that the existing ones do not cater for). Building from scratch is certainly not dead because there are many designs (especially flash generated) which had to be produced from the ground up due to their unique style of navigation, design and representation of content. But with the rise in popular packages such as Wordpress, you can lay down the groundwork and produce something of good quality with less time from start to finish.

[Kernelpower_Ltd]

i SUPPOSE FROM A WEB DEISGNERS VIEWPOINT ITS JUST TOO LONG WINDED TO DO IT FROM SCRATCH.

[SpacePhoenix]

With my own game site I'm trying to code as much as i can myself from scratch, there will more than likely be some parts where I'll use already made code libraries (such as jpeg graph for player score graphs or TinyMCE for the wysiwyg editing of pms, form posts, etc).

I feel that i'll learn php, HTML and CSS (+eventually javascript) a lot better then if were to use a ready made CMS plus i'll have a far better understanding of the underlying code.