Are websites getting too easy to set up?

It was much easier to set up a site in 2000 than today. These days you need to have social media buttons everywhere, RSS feeds, there's video, audio, Wordpress issues, you name it. 12 years ago you needed a WYSIWYG editor, maybe a template and some graphics, not much else.

I think it depends on your traffic source, and a lot of onsite factors as well such as quality of product and pricing.

For example if you already have a large customer list then you may not even need another traffic source.

Websites don't get saturated just by existing - otherwise we would all be screwed already.

It's not easy. Cookie cutter is not going to get the job done to earn you full time income. Unless you're running a website manufacturing line and pumping out a lot of these per day. Even so, you'll probably going to get Animal Slapped by Googs at some point soon.

Your site has to stand out and provide some value. Which will require you putting some brain power into it or you hiring someone to do that.

Find a website building process/model that passes a gut check and then stick to it until it produces the desired result. Simple NOT easy.

Alternatively you could argue that the online market is much bigger and it's easier (and more acceptable) to spend money online than it used to be.

Just having an online store is (and was) pretty meaningless unless you can market it. The challenges and opportunities are different to what they used to be, but IMO it's much too simplistic to say it's easier/harder than it used to be.

Yes, it's unbelievably easy to set up a website, but it is so hard to setup a good one which looks great as well as offers something of value be it aesthetically or content.

With WP, Xsitepro and lots of other wonderful web development software i will say yes.

Technology has always been about making it easier than the former and it's going to get even simpler.

Apologies i meant "in the 2000s" because i would have thought it was much more difficult to make a website in for example 2008 but not that much harder to buy.

So 2008 - difficult to sell but easy to buy. So you may not have as much competition with other sellers online but still big demand?

2012 - Websites are almost 90% already made, youtube vids and forums with enough info to make a website with little difficulty, job losses so more people pursuing an income from home i.e. selling online.

So in short 2012 - Very easy sell and not much easier buy and ebay/amazon collecting customers.

Hopefully i'm wrong because i am selling a few things from a website and depending on it to pick up a bit.

Putting up websites isn't what makes and breaks a business.

It's the marketing that gets targeted traffic to the website.

Plus, you need copy that converts- not all sites will have that.

Easy and hard is all relative. It's never been really easy for me because it's not my thing. Writing is easy for me, cause, duh... That's what I do. My point was that years ago there were a lot fewer widgets and gadgets to tend to. People rave about how simple Wordpress is. Much of it's set up as plug and play but to get things exactly as you want them you need to know a few tricks.

I put up my first WP site in March of this year. Not real hard. But I spent a lot of time on Youtube learning the fine tuning. I could have hired it out but I needed to go through the learning curve because I don't want to have to cry for help every time I need to do some little thing.

If the OP's point is that there's more competition now because it's easier to throw up a site, well, that has almost no relevance at all. A slick-looking site is just dandy but when it comes right down to it, it's about great content and building relationships with your customers. That stuff is universal and doesn't change much at all. In fact, with all the jokers out there trying to game the system by floating crap out there as products, it's probably easier than it ever was.

If you're asking if the web design business has been impacted, I'm sure it has to some degree. However, good designers will always be in demand, because a good businessman knows that template or "cookie-cutter" sites often don't cut it when it comes to branding a company or competing for people's attention in a sea of other websites.

As far as other businesses being impacted, just because they use websites to convey their message, that shouldn't be an issue...

You cannot say that owning an e commerce website will mean nothing in near future. Yes, big sites will be doing the most of the business but still other sites will do business too. In the year 2000, people were not used to with e commerce websites. Now in 2012, they are moving towards e commerce websites rapidly and that is why the number of sites are increasing.

If you have a lot of shops in a place, that place turns into a market very soon. In a market, everyone will have more or less business. I hope you understood.

wrong lolol
maybe if you go back to the 90s you could say it was difficult.

even wordpress is not that simple, if most are following the install from what I hear on these videos, their wp is not secure.

I guess you could say that nothing comes easy.

I think if you can market your website excellent... you won't have competition issues because you're beating the pants off them!!

If something is easy to get into, you spend a lot less time and energy getting into it, which leaves you a lot more time and energy to not suck at it. If you're enough of a badass to get into difficult fields, you're surely enough of a badass to lead the easy ones.

With the easy forms of CMS these days and cheap hosting that you can get anywhere, it's relatively simple to set up a website these days

You are right. In the last decade web technologies have achieved greater levels of easiness and flexibility. Lets hope in the coming days it will get better

No! The easier the better, IMO. It allows more humans to have a VOICE! It is good for humanity and The Earth, IMO.

You can sell a Pringle off a dog turd if you effectively market the Pringle.

I think that now there is more competition, and more requirements for a site to be sucessfull. In the past sometime the only thing you had to do was pretty much to exist and not to provide crappy service.