How to create a professional website?

Question

CMS

For a long time I was engaged in the creation of sites on Wordpress, mainly for myself and sometimes to order. I am not a special professional, but I would like to move in this direction now.
I began to notice that the developers of Wordpress sites are ridiculed and said that this is already the last century. I decided to study what is now the standard for site development professionals and could not specifically find anything, on the Internet, like a few years ago, all the same information about choosing cms or writing the engine yourself.
I decided to study the work of freelancers, to find out if they use cms, I checked several such works and did not find any signs of cms. I came to the conclusion that no one uses cms when creating custom sites, but is there really a separate engine written for each site?
I'm asking this question because I have some misunderstanding. What are the current trends in web development? Why don't professionals use cms even for small sites, because it's quite convenient?

Answer 1

What an interesting question... Well, let's get started. I just had a free evening, we can speculate.
Last century? I do not know, the share of WordPress continues to grow. Now it is almost 27% of the entire Internet, if my memory serves me right. Slightly more than a quarter of all sites in the world . And on the way to one third. Think about it. Realize. And on WP they make projects with budgets of 20, 50, and 150k conventional units. And with monthly support in four or five figures. All this is. The market is huge.
Laughing at WP developers? Well, let them laugh. In the meantime, we are making good money on this "shit engine" (as those who make fun of it are called), we work for pleasure, hang out at all kinds of WP events, create products, make customers happy, spend what we have earned and enjoy life. In general, everything is fine. And laughter for no reason is a sign of a fool (C) children's saying.
Yes, and pay attention to who is laughing. Some rogue freelancer trying to earn a miserable $400-800 a month, hacking his custom framework for days and catching dumb bugs in it? Hipster rubist? An elderly C and Java theorist living with his mother at 40? Well, OK. Let them laugh. I haven't met a single high-end developer, regardless of languages/technologies preferred, that laughs. Because an experienced person understands that this is just a tool. Which, moreover, perfectly performs its tasks. Just like Laravel. Like Django. And everything else.
There are people who are Canon vs Nikon, Apple vs Android, Mercedes vs BMW, etc. Holy Warriors they are called, and are found in any area of ​​life, in any profession. Learn to take a hit and not notice their existence.
Wrong conclusion. Used everywhere. All around. In general, there are 3 approaches:
1. Full custom. Long and expensive. It is beneficial for developers - we fix the client for ourselves to a certain extent, we hang it on support and money constantly drips into our pocket. Not very profitable for the customer, for the same reason - it is difficult to change the contractor if something is not to your liking in the work. Expensive to maintain and develop. For developers, it's a lot of work and reinventing the wheel over and over again. In practice, it is used extremely rarely, most often, although it is built from scratch, ready-made libraries are used for various tasks. The more of these libraries and third-party code, the faster the project flows into the 2nd approach.
2. Framework. Medium-long, medium-expensive. It uses a ready-made framework, the necessary modules, the rest is written for specific tasks. Economically feasible. This is a good option. But there is a lot of work, and bicycles meet, and modules have to be finalized with a file. And if you use a lot of ready-made modules, then smoothly flow into the 3rd approach.
3. CMS/CMF. Cheaper, faster. Here, if the site is very typical and can be assembled without much coding - great. But often there are very voluminous and complex tasks on CMS / CMF, which go far beyond the capabilities of the out-of-the-box engine or ready-made plugins. The same development of custom functionality, finalization of third-party plugins with a file, etc. In general, you can make non-standard sites based on CMS / CMF and nothing prevents you from doing it. The main thing is to understand why, why and how correctly. Understand the CMS/CMF architecture and how to fit into it. This option is highly beneficial for the client, especially when it comes to WP, with its huge market of specialists (however, often of a dubious level. But this is the case everywhere, I have seen projects on Laravel and Yii where the code made me sick like a fountain).
Ultimately, it's all PHP (or another language, it doesn't matter). And custom, and a framework, and a ready-made engine. And all this can be done very well, but it can be done very badly. The question is not in the tool, but in the hands that use it. If you take Monet's brush and paints, you will not produce brilliant paintings. Because it's not about the brush.
In general, if you like WordPress - study its core, deeply and qualitatively, study PHP itself deeply and qualitatively. SQL there. Study the same frameworks, there are a lot of interesting and useful things that you can take into service. Learn to solve problems of any complexity elegantly, quickly, and efficiently. Learn to document and refactor code. Optimize. Use best practices. Learn to create a quality product that solves customer problems. And for this, there will be a queue for you, and they will pay well. And not because you write in pure C plus plus. Or something super-modern. Enterprise clients are generally legacy. And they have the most money, by the way.

Answer 2

a true professional himself is able to create a template (framework) for himself and others, the
rest are lovers of using ready-made code,
and the laziest remain layout designers