Ask HN: Is freelance web development still a viable path in 2019?
Not really.  Wix and GoDaddy clobbered it, and now there are others.  At one point I had over 30 sites requiring regular maintenance, and upgrades.  Plus a few I developed, installed on other servers, and did not maintain.  Now I’m down to about four.  These days there’s almost always someone in a small business’ office with the requisite skills to do basic upgrades, and small changes.  I get called when things go wrong, or there’s a major overhaul in the offing.  Many small businesses do quite well with a Facebook page, or some other self development tool.  The sites look amateurish, and derivative, but they get the job done.  All you want is the ‘Who, what, where, when, and why’, and standards are so low there’s no functional penalty for having a lame Web presence.  I find more clients hiring full time ‘social media’ specialists rather than me.  I have pondered becoming a ‘social media expert’, but the fact that I have worked building some of the early experiments taints me against the concept.<p>Almost all Web sites are similar these days, and there’s a value to designing the UI/UX in a way users expect.  I suggest that, for startups, and small businesses, there’s virtually no need for anything other than a basic Web presence.  With the rise of social media, the appropriate account(s) will solve that problem for most.<p>I worked through the wild west of this industry, and it was semi-fun, but I think we’ve moved on, things have settled down, or are settling down, and there’s a minimum sufficient requirement for a Web presence that’s pretty freakin’ minimal.