I have worked for small businesses creating their websites with website builders like Worpress, Prestashop and Wix. The truth is that every day it is easier to launch a website with these platforms.
I would love to hear your experience!
I’ve never used a DIY solution (Wordpress, Joomla, Wix) and never will.
I feel that they are attempting to put coders in the unemployment line.
I feel that no matter how many templates each has, everything that comes from a DIY site looks/feels cookie-cutter, to me.
I am on the US-CERT mail list, and I frequently see warnings about security vulnerability findings for them (especially Joomla).
And it allows people to put completely obnoxious “bells and whistles” on their sites; I especially dislike the sites that have the first view of the landing page as a video that takes up 100% width, 100% height and loops anywhere from three to ten seconds, expecting the user to scroll down to actually get to the content. I also dislike the sites that use plugins to carousel images, but don’t actually scroll left/right - they use these cheesy transitions to “uncover” the next image, or pixelate the old image into the next one.
I know ONE professional developer who incorporates DIY into his projects, but doesn’t use the drag-n-drop WYSIWYG. These projects look a little better but still feel plastic, to me.
So, bottom line: I do not like DIY sites, and will never use them. Anyone else who does, hey, choice is yours, but don’t expect me to be “wowed” by it.
V/r,
^ _ ^
It depends on how complicated the website is. If it’s just a relatively static page that displays some basic information that hardly ever changes I would definitely pick something off the shelf as putting any effort into custom coding that would be a waste of time.
When picking something off the shelf though, not having to maintain is a huge plus. So you don’t have to worry about updating the underlying platform.
The more a website needs to change and the more elements there are that can’t be generalised, the more I’d be inclined to use custom.
I have a particular aversion to Wix, which requires JavaScript to display anything at all. Without it, all you see is a blank page. 
I believe that SP forums are the same way. There was a two- or three-week period, recently, whereby I could not access SP forums at all. But a “View Source” showed that all the code was present - yet, all I got was a blank page.
Turns out, someone in network admin thought it prudent to block a CDN that SP uses, resulting in the blank page. They’ve since changed back to the way things were, thankfully. Not sure why they did that in the first place, but ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to code and die.
V/r,
^ _ ^
I haven’t checked recently, but it’s generally the case with a Discourse forum that you can access the content to read without JS, but need JS enabled to reply or otherwise interact. But at least you can see the content first to judge whether you want to do that or not.
If all I get is a blank page, I just go elsewhere.
As to source code:
<p class="font_8" style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:30px;">---------------------------------------</span></span></p>
<p class="font_8" style="font-size:20px;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:30px;">On a final note:</span></span></p>
<p class="font_8" style="font-size:20px;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:30px;"><span class="wixGuard"></span></span></span></p>
<p class="font_8" style="font-size:20px;"><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-size:20px;"> </span></span></p>
Would that inspire you to consider using Wix?
You’re asking the guy who blatantly declared that he’d never use a DIY? LOL!
“Och! SPAN TAGS! (shudder, cringe)” Wait… span tags within paragraph tags. D’OH! NESTED span tags. WTF?
V/r,
^ _ ^
I like to be in control and find DIY site builders too restrictive and seem to spend most of my time fighting them.
There is to much un needed code although some of the CMS’s are better than they were.
I use php and include things like header, footer and navigation; so to add a new page it is as easy as adding it to my navigation file.
I have a site with about 20 pages created dynamically from database content all from one page of php and using paging.
It is one thing for people to use DIY website builders for their own site, but for someone to set themselves up as a web designer using such tools seems like fraud. 
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