The Budget Website Is Dead. Here's What's Replaced It.

Something has shifted in the kinds of projects I'm being asked to work on, and I've been thinking about whether it's specific to my practice or a broader change in how small business owners think about what technology can do for them.

The short version: the budget website has largely disappeared from my enquiry list. In its place, I'm increasingly being asked to build things that are genuinely bespoke — dashboards, integrated systems, custom tools that solve a specific problem for a specific business. And honestly, I'm glad of it.

Where the budget website went

For a long time, a significant part of my work was at the simpler end of the spectrum. Small websites for micro-businesses who needed an online presence — a few pages, a contact form, something that said "we exist." That kind of project kept me busy for years.

My hunch is that Wix, Squarespace, and to some extent Shopify have absorbed most of that demand. A business owner with reasonable tech confidence can now build a serviceable website themselves for £20 a month, and for a lot of very small businesses, that's entirely the right call. I said as much in a recent piece on web designers versus DIY website builders — the honest answer is that a website builder is sometimes the right tool for the job.

What's interesting is what's been left behind. The work that a drag-and-drop editor can't do. The problems that require someone to actually write code, think about data architecture, and build something that doesn't exist as a template.

What I've been building instead

In recent months, the projects on my desk have all involved some level of bespoke functionality. A few examples:

• The Whitby Anchor is an online newspaper serving the local community here on the Yorkshire Coast. Building it meant going well beyond a standard WordPress setup — custom post types for different content categories, online payment integration for subscriptions, mailing list automation, and custom dashboard widgets to make the editorial workflow manageable for a small team. Local journalism is important, and it was satisfying to build something that serves a genuine community need.
• A natural health brand I've worked with for several years, Native Wisdom, needed a WooCommerce store that could do things the standard platform doesn't do out of the box — wishlists with shareable links which automatically add all the items to the cart, a discount system shared between customers and the practitioners who recommend products to them, and a dual-domain setup running different themes for different audiences. The kind of project where the brief sounds simple until you get into it.
• The manufacturing dashboard I'm building for Wheeliams Ltd is becoming one of the projects I'm most proud of. It pulls together Shopify sales data, staff records including time clock and holiday, bills of materials, supplier information, stock levels and pricing — all into a single custom interface that replaces a collection of spreadsheets and manual processes. Google Drive integration ensures all their documents and files are in the right place. The kind of thing that, a few years ago, would have required a significant software budget and a development team. I built it as a single developer working directly with the business.
• More recently I've been working on an AI-powered report generator that takes two complex Word documents and produces a structured, formatted output — significantly reducing the time it takes to complete a process that currently involves a lot of manual copying and reformatting. It's still work in progress, but the core functionality is working.
• And yesterday I quoted for an integrated registration, payment, and scheduling system for an online tutoring business — tying together the things that tutoring platforms do separately (booking, payment, calendar management) into a single coherent system that works the way that particular business actually operates.

What's changed

What strikes me most about this shift isn't the technical complexity — it's where the ideas are coming from.

For a long time, the conversation with a prospective client often involved helping them imagine what was possible. Explaining what a bespoke system could do for their business, what problems it could solve, what manual processes it could replace. The developer as translator between "what technology can do" and "what I actually need."

That's changed. More often than not now, clients arrive with a clear vision of what they want to build. They've thought through the problem, worked out — at least in outline — what a solution would look like, and they want someone who can deliver it. The client as the source of the idea, the developer as the person who builds it.

I think that's a good development. It suggests that small business owners are developing a genuine understanding of what technology is capable of, rather than treating it as a black box that only specialists can reason about. Whether that's down to increased exposure to digital tools during and after the pandemic, the accessibility of AI tools that let people prototype ideas more easily, or something else entirely, I'm not sure. Probably all of the above.

What comes next

I have no idea how long this direction of travel will last, or what will replace it. A few years ago I'd have said confidently that AI wouldn't affect the kind of bespoke development work I do — now I'm not so sure, and I'd rather be honest about that than pretend otherwise. What I do know is that the most valuable thing I offer isn't the ability to write code; it's the ability to understand a business's actual problem and build something that solves it. That's not going anywhere.

In the meantime: if you're a small business owner who's been wondering whether a custom system or dashboard might be worth exploring for your business, I'd love to have that conversation. The barrier to entry is lower than most people assume. And if you want a rough sense of what bespoke development projects typically cost, I've written about that in more detail here.