In web design, everything easy is hard again
There is a difference between web design and web application development. If you are a designer making brochure sites for small business, you don&#x27;t need the modern frameworks and toolkits, and you are over-engineering it if you use them.<p>Everyone needs to take a step back and ask why they are building a web site in the first place. My local hair salon really just needs a brochure, and maybe a scheduling widget. A doctors office would need to add on a payment system. Both of which can be achieved by pulling in a script to use a 3rd party solution, while the core web site can remain plain, static HTML... done in Notepad, if you want to get really simple.<p>When you step up to needing some actual functionality, there still is a line in the sand where a few PHP scripts will do the job, and can just be pushed up to a shared web host.<p>When you cross that line, THEN you need modern tools. And many sites will need to go there. But a boutique design firm should be able to go a long way without, and probably could just hire some devs if they do land a project large and complex enough to need that level of code.<p>Just because you can go complex doesn&#x27;t mean you should.