Website from Scratch or Wordpress?

Building from scratch is almost always the more costly option, both financially and labor.

Things to keep in mind when you build from scratch:

• You're responsible for all the code you build. You have to be the one enhancing features, fixing bugs, and maintaining that application code. The more code you personally own, the slower it becomes shipping.
• Applications are like Icebergs - you only see a small portion on the surface. Do you want to dedicate your time towards building robust features that aren't the key selling point of the product? I've done this before building in-house Authentication and 0/10 would repeat again. Today when I'm contracted to build completely new solutions for clients, I exhaust all options with off-the-shelf components before I opt-in to building it myself. No-code or low-code is the best code.
• You're responsible for the documentation of your code. Maybe that's not a problem if you're the only team member on the project but if you're working in a collaborative environment or hand the project off to another dev at a later time, the lack of docs will either bite you at the end, or piss off those who continue your work.
• Time is money. While you may be doing this pro-bono for experience, you don't want to spend months or even years doing pro-bono work. Free efforts should be time-boxed.

You have a few things to consider here:

1. What are you most comfortable with? You might not be charging labour, but you still want the path of least resistance.

2. If you build something, can you just hand it over and forget about it, or does it need maintaining?

By the sounds of it you have 2 sites here, an ecommerce site and a static website. Let's take a look at the static site first.

Static 'portfolio' website

You haven't given us much info, but I'm going to assume this is a simple 'Contact Me' kind of website that simply lists some contact information for something. It's unlikely to be updated very often, if at all.

This kind of site lends itself very well to being built from scratch. The technology you use is up to you here depending on what you're most comfortable with, but you could easily take a starter template from something like Tailwind or Bootstrap and tweak it to meet your needs.

In terms of hosting, because it's a simple static website, you have plenty of options, and a lot of them are free. Some to consider:

• GitHub Pages
• Cloudflare Pages
• Vercel

DNS and WAF can be handled by Cloudflare for free.

Ecommerce website

This is a little more tricky, and really depends on yours and your clients' requirements now and in the future.

WordPress and WooCommerce

WordPress and WooCommerce is great (in fact, we offer a certification in WordPress development), but you must keep the website and associated plugins up-to-date. Due to its popularity, WordPress has a target on its back for malicious users, so keeping everything up to date is imperative.

However, WooCommerce is a complete system, that will allow you to build out a website quickly and easily, and once it is built the hosting costs are reasonably low. You can either roll your own hosting with little-to-no cost on AWS (free tier) or go with a PaaS (platform as a service) provider like WPEngine.

The important takeaway here is that you can't just hand it over and walk away.

Shopify

Another option is Shopify. Shopify is a hosted platform, so you have very limited access to the code that runs the website. That's an advantage and disadvantage, depending on your requirements.

The pros on this is that from a maintenance point-of-view Shopify does everything. They maintain all hosting infrastructure and ensure you're PCI (or equivalent) compliant, take care of your taxes and offer various shipping options.

The downside is that you have less control over the frontend than with WooComm, and you have no access to any backend features. They do have various APIs and allow you to create extensions which does cover some things, but it's certainly not as flexible as something self-hosted.

It's a trade-off, but if you're looking to just build something that works and hand-off to your client then I'd personally look at Shopify over WooComm.

With regards to costs, Shopify is pretty affordable. The lowest tier is in line with what you're expect to pay for hosting. Shopify does get expensive when you start selling, as they take a percentage of sales, but so long as you know this up front it's not as jarring as upfront costs, and it of course scales with your sales.

Hope this helps.

For the e-commerce site I think WooCommerce is the best option for long term stability and ease of use. The monthly cost of having it run by a managed service is well worth it. You don’t want to have to be concerned about WordPress security, so knowing the service provider is responsible for updates is good peace of mind.

For the static site you have tons of easy options. Going no-code would probably be the easiest but not very interesting imo. I’m not familiar with best options for no-code.

If you want a fun project, I’d recommend building the site using Astro and deploying to Cloudflare pages. The free plan will be more than adequate and the site will be very fast and reliable.

I’d recommend using a template from astro.new