The Process

Cool! This is the #1 request from nearly every client and sales call through all web and app development.

The reason that "simple" and "basic" are sought after is two fold:

1. Deliver information and convert quickly and efficiently
2. Keep your price point low by not requiring too much work

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein

"Simple" and "basic" does not equate to being "easy" — in fact, simple and basic are significantly harder when it comes to web design. It's easy, albeit costly, to build and integrate every possible feature, stuff every relevant keyword inside thousands of words in text, but that's not effective. Nobody cares about long diatribes on a landscaping website repeating "local & family owned," do they? Nope!

Figuring out what you need to say in a few words, photos, graphics, and videos is a challenge. Especially when you're trying to be competitive in your market. But it's essential to converting users into customers. For more details about simplicity on the web, read here.

Great! Aspiring designers and developers are crucial to keep the industry growing and evolving. Websites can be expensive and a super low or free price tag is very tantalizing.

Unfortunately the majority of these projects fail or drag on endlessly. Unless the friend/nephew/coworker is a web designer & developer by trade, the end result will not be good. Even if it aesthetically looks good, chances are the messaging and text is bad. Or the pages don't make sense and users struggle to find what they need. Or it loads sooooooooo slow. There'll always be something and the list of what to do and how to do it is far too much to easily list without experience in the software industry.

When you start building your website, you're entering a business arrangement. Be prepared to be doing business when describing your website, reviewing your designs, deploying, then maintaining your software. If you want to be partnered in business with your friend/nephew/coworker, then go for it! Often it's their "side hustle" and they don't have time to help or your software is experiencing problems that are far outside their skill set.

Yep! These tools have come a long way and they'll continue to get better and better. Hell, ProtoRebel even uses Wordpress and refers some people to Squarespace or Shopify. These are genuinely good solutions with active development and large communities of contributors.

Welcome to the land of web development! You'll be embarking on a journey to become an intern-level web designer, developer, content writer, and hosting manager. Quickly you'll realize that Google searches and Stack Overflow are your new best friends. Hopefully you have a knack for design and understand how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) works for the web.

You have all the issues from the friend/nephew/coworker scenario, but you're starting from about zero. These sites are easy to spot not just because the code quality is poor or the site is ugly. The messaging is very scattered or from an odd perspective. The photos are poorly cropped and implemented. There's always something that is simply not good.

Do it and send it to us! AI is an extremely powerful tool that we use occasionally. Some services are great at giving reliable and quality code. Some results are hilariously heinous. Either way, it's pretty cool.

Now what to do with it? Where does that code go? How does it get updated? How is it deployed it to a web server? Go ahead, ask it these questions and follow its instruction. Every question builds more and more complexity within the project. Eventually bugs will start cropping up. Describe the problems to AI and AI will do its best to help. But it's losing context as it goes. It will start giving conflicting code with other portions of code/configuration it wasn't taking into consideration. And now there's more bugs. And it's getting less context.

This option is the most nefarious as it's all the problems of "can i build it myself" with the "friend/nephew/coworker" scenarios with a very powerful tool. It's like building a house with only a chainsaw: you can probably do it, but why? Read an article for more info.