THE PROBLEM
With so many website building platforms available in 2025, it might seem like coding websites is outdated and impractical. So much time is needed just to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, while platforms like Wix and Squarespace can get you a decent looking website up and ready in a matter of minutes. Why bother?
For most cases, I would tend to agree. If you really need a website for your dog-walking side-hustle, there is really no reason to spend money to hire a developer to build a hand crafted site for you. When you’re just getting started, a Wix or Squarespace template that gets you online quickly is absolutely fine.
But what about an architecture firm that needs a refined, elevated design that can’t easily be implemented with squarespace? What about an established interior design studio with a deep portfolio of commercial and residential work, looking for custom filtering for their gallery pages? Plugins and widgets exist, but ensuring each one is compatible with what you have, visually fits your site, and is easy for your team to maintain gets difficult. Not to mention that the reliability and security of these tools is completely out of your hands.
In these examples, it makes much more sense to build a custom solution from the ground up, rather than haphazardly sticking on plugin after plugin onto your existing site and hoping everything works. I think the best way to illustrate this is going through my own thought process on why I coded this website, instead of going with any website platforms.
WHY I CODED THIS WEBSITE
First, I knew I wanted it to have some unique motion graphics and animations. Some of the effects I had in mind, like my fluid ‘lava-lamp’ buttons and hover-based blurring, require a level of CSS support that some builders do not provide. Other animations, like the mouse-tracking marble sculpture that you see on the home page, can not have any noticeable lag or delay for the user and needed Javascript to implement. In general, I needed pretty extensive freedom to write custom code, and have the ability to control the performance of my animations.
Right away this rules out some platforms like Wix, where no custom code option exists. Squarespace lets you write custom CSS, but the way their HTML is generated would make my blur effects impossible. Wordpress is pretty open to custom development, making most of what I wanted technically feasible, but Wordpress websites are famously bloated and slow due to all their own code in their websites.
The most promising platforms for my website idea are the newer platforms like Webflow and Framer - both of which are very developer-friendly. However, Framer will lock you into their hosting plan and does not let you download the code for your website, meaning any future plans for my website need to be compatible with Framer. Webflow seems like the best option so far - with just some minor issues like how they structure HTML and some potential ways their code could conflict with mine.
Next, I wanted my website to be a place where I could practice web development concepts like user authentication, content-recommendation algorithms, and pages with dynamic data. These are all concepts that could be used inside a large blogging platform, and so I wanted my website to be able to generate blog articles quickly to start off. I wanted these articles to have a style consistent with the rest of my site, be easily created through a CMS, and flexible enough for me to experiment with features like user comments.
Framer and Webflow are not suitable options, since Framer has a barebones CMS and both have limited freedom when it comes to server side features, meaning features like comments, likes, and user profiles would require the entire project to be taken off their platforms. Wix and Squarespace are complete non-starters, suffering from the same lack of server side flexibility, and the aforementioned design constraints.
Blogging is where Wordpress really shines, being optimized for this exact purpose. It provides a comprehensive CMS with good access to backend features that I need. However, going with my own design would probably mean building a custom Wordpress theme from scratch, which means I would be writing my own code anyway. Setting aside the fact that Wordpress uses PHP instead of Javascript, my motion graphics on my homepage would be hard to pull off in a Wordpress project. I briefly thought about having my blog run on Wordpress, while the animation heavy home page would be coded myself, but maintaining and connecting two separate systems seemed like it would be a nightmare.
Ultimately, building a website that has some fairly demanding design requirements, while also being open to a wide range of backend features for a blogging platform leaves very few viable choices for my website. Building this out myself was the most straightforward way, and I immediately started by opening up my code editor and writing code.
SO... WHICH APPROACH DO I GO WITH?
So to summarize, deciding to code a website or use a website builder just comes down to knowing the scope of your project before you begin. Just like how adding a balcony, another floor, and a garage to an existing house that was originally planned to be small creates more problems than it solves, stretching your website builders capabilities past what the platform was intended for is just impractical.
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