Todays competition for a single developer

[pwired]

Hi,

I hear more and more people around me say: "who needs a website these days" ?

They say that facebook is much more popular than having your own website.

And Companies prefer a web agency above a single developer because a web agency

delivers a wider range of service than just a website and better guarantees continuity.

What are your thoughts and experience with this ?

[cstevensjr]

At it's simplest, with your website you own the data and can control how it is used or shared. 

[LostKobrakai]

Facebook might seem nice from the outside, but it's actually a damn lot of work to get any reach without paying facebook to advertise the company. Without regular (daily at best) posts you'll hardly get visitors beyond the people who actually know you already.

The agency vs. single dev argument might be true, but that's the case for every single freelancer no matter of the industry. I think the best way to get along with that is a strong portfolio and optionally a small high quality set of partners and fellow devs (of other strengths), which you can rely on in bigger projects. Especially if they have a strong portfolio as well you can certainly assure clients that they'll get the same quality as they can expect from an similarly sized agency. Surely you can't do the job a whole team of people is doing in an agency, especially in a similar timeframe. So to get the really big projects one needs to have a critical number of people on board.

[Neo]

I see more and more small businesses in my region focusing completely on Facebook and Twitter, but that depends always on individual budgets. Overall, there is a lot of competition out there in the form of drag-and-drop website builders, WordPress templates etc and not every business will value a custom-made website. 

In the end of the day, running a web-related business is 50% sales. You need to be able to sell and market your skills to potential clients. In this respect, larger agencies have more resources and account managers, which will aggressively sell their solutions. While larger corporations will many times prefer an agency, small- and medium-sized companies often like the flexibility and responsiveness of individual freelancers. It really depends on the target clients you want to focus on and the related budgets you realistically can achieve.