My Thoughts On Website Builders

TL;DR

They don't pose a serious threat due to being too simplistic and often producing sub-optimal results.

Long Version

Being a web developer you'd think I would be the first to raise my voice and complain like a little bitch every time someone mentions one of the free or paid website creator software packages on the market, people might think that these products steal a lot of potential customers and therefore income that would otherwise go to me or some other web developer, as most business owners and individuals don't have the skills, knowledge or time to build their own website from scratch using tools and skills professional developers have.

Although these tools probably steal a very small percentage of mine and others business, I believe that these sitebuilders are simply not advanced enough to be able to make anything that is as good as what a developer could build with his knowledge and experience, if you go beyond their cookie cutter layouts or limited functionality, you simply cant get the result you want.

Yes sure, they are fine if all you need is a 3 page website for your small restaurant down the street, all they need is a simple page with the menu and possibly a phone number on it.

But what if they wanted to integrate some sort of ordering system on their website? then they would need to hire a real web developer.

Sure you CAN do that with a simple contact form that sends email to a dedicated mailbox for this purpose, but that quickly becomes cluttered and disorganized and anyone with a website with a contact form can testify that you will get a lot of spam by doing it this way.

Another thing I have noticed with most of these site builders is that they produce god awful HTML with inline styles on half of the elements, as well as adding unnecessary markup everywhere, that not only makes the site render slower, but it makes the file-size larger and will take longer to download and will waste your bandwidth if you're on a data-capped plan.