I love when businesses do stuff like this. If it works, it works.
My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but make their solution better and ensure my solution for them works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the success they already had with what they were doing already.
A lot of developers don't want to admit this—in my experience at least—but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions actually work better than a ton of strategies experienced web developers would implement on their own.
So much of what counts is what the business offers and how they relate and interact with customers. Sometimes all that takes is a word doc exported to HTML. We can use our skills to improve it, but the real magic is in the humans running the business. I love it.
I find something fun is that finding ways to improve these solutions can actually be genuinely challenging. Sure, you can make a better website, you can deploy it with sophisticated infrastructure, etc. but at the end of the day, do their customers prefer it? Does it improve their business? Sometimes that part isn't trivial at all.
Totally! The magic of using your print menu word doc as the website is its so little work to keep the site updated. No one really cares that a family restaurant in a Toronto suburb has a visually stunning website. You just want to see the menu, hours, address and phone number. It's always going to be updated, exactly the same content as the print menu that you actually pay from, and they already knew how to make things look legible in word.
It's actually even more charming than any solution we ended up providing because this particular restaurant (sadly closed now) was run by a 60-70ish year old man, who's cropped portrait photo was their logo, `float:left` in the header of their index.html exported from Word. I don't think you can buy authenticity like that.
I of course thought that was hilarious because I was 19, an idiot, with my first tech job thinking I'm such a professional cranking out CodeIgniter-based contact forms and static About Us pages.
Looking back, I'm pretty sure we did them dirty. Whatever solution we sold them on (IIRC, they got a wordpress site with a custom theme) was probably less useful. Which sucks.
I've been volunteering with a local political party to help them with their technology decisions, primarily on the web, and... based on this and prior experiences, I've come to the conclusion that agencies do their clients dirty quite often. In some cases it looks borderline intentional, in others I think it's a disconnect between client needs, agency capabilities, communication, and what's ultimately delivered.
It seems weird to say it since so many people rely on it, but wordpress is overkill for so many things. It frustrates so many clients to no end, requires ongoing maintenance that's quite expensive in some cases, and well, it requires an active server handling server-rendering and form submissions and such. The vast majority of clients simply don't need it. They don't even need themes.
This party I'm helping has something like 7 wordpress sites strewn about, all on hosts that cost way too much, some not even updated or maintained at all, sitting on servers that peak at like 40% utilization and otherwise hum along at near-zero utilization beyond what the wordpress isntance requires.
This is a lot of the internet. My experience with these folks has inspired me to build something that would meet their needs, but it's one of these things where... I don't know, if I build it, I doubt anyone would come. But yeah. Most people's needs for the internet are remarkably simple. Even Wix or similar are way, way too much. Yet those basic blogging engines totally miss the mark too. Most of these business users aren't interesting in blogging. They just want a simple home base where they can dump various types of information and let it hang out forever.
I can think of a few products which aim to fix this, but they aren't quite simple enough for the types of people we're describing. The people who know they need stuff online, but don't want to know much about it and don't want to learn much either.
I do consulting for a few restaurants, and despite my experience building full-stack web applications, I find myself reaching for Excel for most of my deliverables. These are "applications" that "non-technical" restaurant operators need to be comfortable in. Having a sheet where they paste in some data and get their needed output has required the least amount of continued maintenance and training. They can drag the file around in Dropbox / Google Drive and that works for them.
I still try to "engineer" to the best of my ability—separating raw input from derived data from configuration, data normalization, etc. With Lambda functions in Excel now, I kinda just pretend I'm writing Lisp in an FRP editor / runtime environment. The ETL tools with PowerQuery are quite good for the scale that these restaurants operate at.
Hard for me to turn off my brain in my full-time job when I am tasked with poorly recreating a feature that Excel nailed years ago.
It’s a shame that Access died, because that’s what you would have built this in 25 years ago, and it would have been better for your client in every respect.
People forget to keep track of how long it takes them to do things.
I see people bifurcated into "people good at time estimates" and "people who think time estimates are always wrong." The former have been keeping track, improved continuously, and have become good. The latter have no clue.
Setting up a website from scratch is not hard, but it is time consuming, especially when you throw in maintenance.
My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but make their solution better and ensure my solution for them works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the success they already had with what they were doing already.
A lot of developers don't want to admit this—in my experience at least—but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions actually work better than a ton of strategies experienced web developers would implement on their own.
So much of what counts is what the business offers and how they relate and interact with customers. Sometimes all that takes is a word doc exported to HTML. We can use our skills to improve it, but the real magic is in the humans running the business. I love it.
I find something fun is that finding ways to improve these solutions can actually be genuinely challenging. Sure, you can make a better website, you can deploy it with sophisticated infrastructure, etc. but at the end of the day, do their customers prefer it? Does it improve their business? Sometimes that part isn't trivial at all.