I used to do Wordpress development and the short of it is, it wasn’t profitable enough to be sustainable for me. These days, web development is more of a side gig for me and I’m no longer using Wordpress. I don’t necessarily need to make a full-time income with it and I’m certainly not looking for high pressure, high stakes projects, but I was wondering where the best opportunities are for freelancers these days and what would be best skills/technologies to learn for those sorts of jobs?
Also, as a more specific side question, are things like Hugo and Jekyll much in demand these days as far as freelance goes?
I would learn to make static sites with something like eleventy or jekyll, personally.
That’s definitely one of the directions I’m leaning. Static sites just seem so much simpler to manage.
I use eleventy + netlify. It’s how I serve my docs site for free: https://www.tybalt.org/pages/eleventy-plugin/
I have a GitHub action that builds and deploys the site on every commit. No database, no running server, just html/css/js. If you’re curious about the setup or have any questions trying to do the same, lemme know!
If you’re looking for one thing to help be productive, it’s probably Rails. If you just want to knock something out fast and aren’t really interested in web tech itself, Rails provides the fastest “time to usable website” of any framework I have personally used.
It’s not my favorite bit of web tech by any means (I really like Elixir/Phoenix and Clojure, and Rust is my bread and butter today) but I also don’t dislike it. I used rails in the past for rapid prototyping and it is pretty impressive just how fast you can get a working product with minimal learning.
That sounds promising. I’m not overly familiar with Rails, but I’ll definitely have to look into that more.
The Odin Project has a Ruby on Rails track if you’re interested :)
That’s a great idea! I was looking at the Odin Project the other week and it seemed to have great content. Thanks!
If you’re willing to do maintenance, get a resller hosting account and sign people up for hosting on it. Or just get cheap hosting somewhere. Something that would be maintained for you (e.g. shared hosting). Then it also becomes a source of [mostly] passive income.
Then you would be able to do whatever type of sites you want. Like others have said, static sites of some sort. Learn a common templating engine and javascript so you can work with a bundler like Webpack that will do some automation for you.
