My first professional sites were built in Flash — animated, musical, and completely dead within a decade when the platform was discontinued. Watching years of work become unopenable taught me the lesson that governs every platform decision I've made since: platforms are temporary; your content and your customers are not. Choose accordingly.
Marketing site the client will edit → Webflow. Clean output, fast pages, a visual editor a marketing manager can safely use, and full code export if you ever leave. I built Fairway Staffing this way. The trade-off is honest: hosting costs more than commodity PHP hosting, and deeply custom features hit walls.
Store → Shopify. For real e-commerce — inventory, taxes, payments, fraud — you want infrastructure someone else keeps compliant at 2am. EstroBlock runs on it. I customize the theme; I don't rebuild checkout. Nobody should rebuild checkout.
Editorial operation with a content team → WordPress, eyes open. It still has the best multi-author publishing workflow. It's also the most attacked software on the internet and the plugin economy is where budgets go to die — a WordPress site is a commitment to maintaining a WordPress site. I recommend it when the publishing workflow earns that overhead, and not otherwise.
Product or platform → custom code. When the website is the business — accounts, feeds, messaging, data — no builder survives contact with the requirements. YESHVA is custom across web, iOS and Android because a community platform's logic can't be assembled from plugins.
SwiftCRM — the lead-capture assistant on this site — is plain PHP and SQLite, installable on the cheapest shared hosting in the world. That's not nostalgia; it's engineering for the actual constraint. Small businesses live on $5–$15/month hosting, and a tool that demands more infrastructure than the business has is a tool that doesn't get used. Boring technology that runs anywhere, owned outright by the client, beats impressive technology that creates dependency. That principle scales up: the most expensive line item in web development is complexity nobody needed.
Before committing to any platform, tool, or agency, ask one question: if this relationship ends tomorrow, what still works? Do you control the domain? Can you export the site — actual usable code and content, not a proprietary backup? Does your customer data live somewhere you can reach without their login? Every sad story I've been called in to fix — and after twenty years there have been many — traces back to a "no" that nobody asked about at the start.
There is no best platform; there are only correct matches. Anyone who recommends the same platform for every project is describing what they know how to sell, not what you need. The right choice falls out of three questions: who updates this, what does it have to do in two years, and what happens if we part ways. Answer those first and the platform picks itself.
Wrong question — they're tools for different jobs. Webflow wins for design-led marketing sites with light editing needs; WordPress wins for multi-author publishing operations willing to carry its maintenance burden. For a typical service business's site, I reach for Webflow far more often in 2026.
Almost certainly not for the website itself. Custom development earns its cost when you need behavior no platform provides — booking logic, member areas, products. Paying custom prices for a brochure site is buying a handmade hammer.
Whatever passes the hostage test: your own domain registration, hosting in your own account, and a platform with genuine export. Webflow, plain static/PHP sites, and self-hosted tools pass easily. Proprietary all-in-one builders mostly don't — that convenience is the price.
Deliberately. Subscription software creates a permanent landlord. SwiftCRM installs on the client's own hosting with their data in their own database — if I disappear tomorrow, every install keeps working. I'd rather sell ownership than rent dependency; it's also simply what I'd want as a client.
Have a question these pages don’t answer? Ask me directly — or ask my assistant right now.
Start a Conversation