I agree with this to an extent.
I'm new(ish) to this game, so I'm not going to make any assumptions. What I will say is that a successful development, in my eyes at least, takes a lot more than a vBulletin board and a few HTML skills. For what vBulletin does it works very well, but problems crop up when it comes to integrating vBulletin into the rest of your site, or when it comes to introducing custom modules into your site, be it news feeds, a wiki or whatever else, and integrating these into the custom design of your vBulletin board.
I love vBulletin. I think it's the perfect starting point for any budding web developer. But when it comes to creating a feature rich site, I feel it falls short. Not only that, but I question the size of returns generated for any webmaster running a vBulletin board without a strong membership. The mods available via vBulletin.org are terrific - I am about to launch a number of forums using many of them - but they are limited. Herein lies the problem when relying on software, be it vBulletin a CMS or CMF etc you have to weigh up the time you need to commit to the learning curve against the returns on offer to your prospective development.
More recently I have taken a passing interest in the inner working of Drupal and Typo3, both terrific applications, but both with a steep learning curve. Drupal is terrific in the respect you can upload it and configure away with next to no experience of any programming language whatsoever. But it is also a very powerful tool that can be used to develop complex websites e.g.
http://www.theonion.com I've barely even begun looking at Typo3!
I feel that anyone starting in this industry with a view to lasting, would do themselves a favour getting to know the ins and outs of a programming language, be it PHP, ASP or whatever else. I imagine it will become less of a problem as the money begins to trundle on in, as come that point will be able to outsource work to the professionals (as Reece has pointed out). But in the meantime, for the sake of being able to respond to the evolutionary demands of your website, I feel at least an intermediary grasp of some of the more popular languages to be beneficial.
I know I have strayed way off topic here, but in sum yes, yes I do feel there is profit to be made from developing and like Reece, I wouldn't classify a development as a wordpress blog with some adsense code pasted on for good luck.
Play the long game.
Reece said:
Completely agree.
Slapping some cookie cutter Wordpress code together with an Adsense block and then having it auto-update via RSS feeds isn't exactly what I think of when someone says they have a developed website...
I think the easiest, most profitable development is a forum -- vBulletin is super cheap and is all you really need (there are even free alternatives you could get started with and port to vBulletin at a later date if money is an issue). A great, unique idea (like MIR with 24hourforum.com) + good marketing skills is all you really need.
Website development can get pretty ugly if you ever have a falling out with your designer.. It's really not that hard to learn HTML, how to use a server, etc nowadays -- tutorials all over the place and then programs like Dreamweaver which do the dirty work for you.
I hire people myself to do most of my web design -- not because I can't do most of it myself but because I can make better money domaining then I'm paying them. The problem with hiring people is:
1- there are not near enough good designers to go around
2- good designers are generally (very) expensive
3- good designers still make mistakes
If you can't take care of reviewing #3 yourself, you pretty much need 2 designers for any moderately complicated project.
