I went to college to build custom websites. My first company hard-coded them. I believed, genuinely, that anything else was cutting corners.
Then I opened an arcade, built it a fully custom site, and six months later I was working sixty-hour weeks and losing entire evenings to changing a price.
That is the argument. Not that custom work is bad. That a custom-coded website is a maintenance bill you pay in your own time, and venue owners do not have that time.
What actually went wrong
The site was fine at launch. I spent a month on it before opening and I was proud of it.
The problem showed up in month six, when I was deep in running the place. Every change meant going into the code. Update a price, spend a night. Swap a photo, spend a night. Post a promotion, spend a night. None of that was hard. All of it was slow, and it was slow at the exact moment I had the least time in my life.
About a year in, we moved to a bigger location and I rebuilt the site. On Squarespace.
That decision killed something in me. But the maths was not close. Twenty hours on a platform, or a hundred hours writing it from scratch, while also running a business. I have been telling clients the same thing ever since.
Can you edit your own site in five minutes?
That is the whole test.
You might know how to go into the code and make the change. I could too. It does not matter. On a platform you will do it five to ten times faster, and the time you get back goes to answering customers, fixing the thing that broke, doing your taxes, or going home.
Your staff should be able to change a price
This is the benefit nobody mentions and it is the one I felt most.
For a long time I was the only person who could touch my website. Once I moved to a platform I could hand off pricing updates, photos, and promotions to my staff and stop being the bottleneck. Nobody needed to be technical.
If only one person in your building can update the website, that is a staffing problem disguised as a technology problem.
The things a platform does that you would forget to do
Mobile. 57.8% of website visitors are on a phone. A platform handles both layouts. Hand-coded, you handle it, and you handle it again every time you change something.
Search. You can absolutely build SEO into a custom site. But a platform gives you a working baseline for free, and there is real ground between a decent baseline and the nothing you end up with when there is no time to do it manually. The upgrades beyond that baseline are worth paying for. The baseline should not be the thing you are fighting for.
Uptime. If you host it yourself and it goes down, you drop everything. In this industry the website is where bookings come from, so it going down is not an IT issue, it is a closed door. On a platform that is somebody else's job, with better uptime and a support team.
Not making it ugly. These platforms make it hard to build something bad. Writing your own code, without a designer, it will probably turn out ugly. I say that as someone who used to write his own code.
I am not going to push one platform. Squarespace, Webflow and WordPress all work, and they suit different levels of commitment. WordPress alone is 43.1% of all websites, so it has earned the mention.
So should you hire someone?
Yes, usually. If a venue owner has a choice between spending twenty hours on their own website and handing it to somebody who does this daily, hand it over. That is what the money is for.
Just know what you are buying.
After a decade in agencies I can tell you almost nobody is building you a genuinely custom website. They have internal templates and a component library, same as everyone else. "Custom" is a word that gets attached to the invoice, not to the build.
That is not a scandal. Reusing a proven structure is why the site launches in weeks and why it still works. It only becomes a problem when you are charged a premium for a word.
What to actually ask for
Ask whether you can update it yourself. Ask whether your staff can. Ask how fast it loads on a phone on a bad connection in your parking lot. Ask whether someone can book without calling you.
Those four answers decide whether your website earns money.
Whether the underlying code was typed from scratch does not come up once.