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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I really miss the days when I started almost 15 years ago sometimes when we would just build a site with Dreamweaver Templates, and FTP it up to the server when it was ready. Maybe add a CGI form if we’re feeling fancy. It was remarkably more simple to keep an understanding and mental model of the entire project.

Honestly part of me still feels like that would be good enough for most businesses these days still, but that’s just not what developers want to build.

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This is indeed good enough; in fact there was a post recently about how demand for Ruby On Rails (a "boring", server-side MVC framework) is still going strong.

Javascript, single page apps and React are all the hype, but outside of a few unicorns (Facebook, Airbnb, etc), the "boring" way is still where most of the money is being made. A lot of businesses still rely on Wordpress for example, and while that platform is garbage from a maintenance & security perspective, it does its job and proves that customers don't actually care about your site being powered by hype technologies.

The front page of Wordpress.com claims "WordPress powers 31% of the internet."

A lot of mileage in the "boring" frameworks!

Probably why static site generators are popular. Highly effective, shallow learning curve, simple.

I just googled Dreamweaver and it still exists! I wonder who uses and pays for such software today. I used it like 15 years ago when I was a kid, that and Microsoft Frontpage, but can`t imagine paying for Dreamweaver today.

It comes as part of the Adobe Suite license. I’ve kicked the tires recently but I don’t know who is actually still using it. ColdFusion developers I guess. I don’t know if it still holds true but the government had a lot of ColdFusion as of a few years ago.

Which government?

And those businesses just opt for a nice Weebly or Wix template, or something similar - there's no need for a developer.

Hell, I’m a developer and I just made myself a Squarespace blog. It’s $12/month and I set the whole thing up in a few hours.

Seems kind of pricey to me for a personal blog. I host 8 sites on a $5 a month DigitalOcean droplet two of which get pretty high traffic.

That seems rather expensive just to host a blog...

And they don't work without js enabled. It's embarrassing when I visit a web designers or developers site and it's a blank page.

I don't think we're talking about developers' pages, but small businesses. And I don;t think small businesses in general give one jot for people who have JS turned off.

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