(This was my mindset when I was first looking to make a site say back in 2008-ish)
Is this a normal opinion - As looking around today with services like Squarespace, Webflow it seems it's much more accepted to just use rather than build...
- free
- just works
- handle all the traffic it gets without any issues (a HN first page can send 10k viewers in a few hours)
- good stats, decent analytics
- all common wordpress plugins preconfigured
- good themes ready in one click
- good indexing in google
- good reputation (who doesn't trust whatever.wordpress.com?).
#####
Shit you make yourself:
- Start paying $5/month to digital ocean and $15/year for the domain. Get none of the above. :D
#Just my experience
There's a million and one 'developers' out there, what sets you apart? Any school kid can put up a wordpress site (and they do!) you need to show people you're capable!
NOT any people can fill it with good content ;)
Sure I could write my own blog if I wanted to, but it would not be as good as Wordpress. Wordpress was forked from a B2 project that got abandoned.
I want to write my own forum software someday that finds a better way to reward good behavior with Bitcoins and punish bad behavior with hiding comments and posts. The users decide using credits to vote up or down, and if they earn enough credits they can sell them to other users for Bitcoins, etc. But it is just a theory and dream so far.