Re: easiest and best way to create a website
I'm going to offer a little bit of a different perspective that's almost entirely unrelated to your question, I apologize in advance.
In my own professional journey, I went to school to learn programming (focus on real time physics simulations) and dabbling with doing cool looking stuff with Direct X. (Direct X 9 at the time... long time ago now).
I decided I'd rather do something else with my life, got into affiliate marketing, and then started working with an old friend that'd spent his career as a graphic designer. It's been 7 or 8 years since then, and I've had my hands in a lot of different kinds of projects, wandering around based on whatever the client wanted. I'm fairly comfortable making custom themes, started out with hacking my own together, then got into bootstrap and sass, from there realizing that even Bootstrap was bloated and not the best for site performance, and looked for other directions. That's not even getting into the time I spent with adwords, organic SEO, outbound marketing and copywriting, CRM, split testing, email autoresponder campaigns, and a whole grip of other stuff.
Here's the thing though... I can sort of get by with a lot of that, and even someone who's actually good at any of those areas might not notice right away that I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if I talk to them for too much longer than that, the holes start to show. Part of the reason I'm here and on the GMB forum as often as I am, part of why I get so interested in
new ranking puzzles (especially when someone else points out new tricks, thanks Joy!) is that I don't want to be a guy that can kind of get the job done. Back in college we called coders like that marines. Yeah they could code something that would work, but God help whoever had to come in behind them and clean up the mess.
What's worse, if you're dabbling in something new, it's especially dangerous for the first while to actually get paid for your work, because
what you know doesn't line up with what you think you know for quite a while. Worse, even if you're getting paid well for your time, it can ultimately damage how the client thinks of you, and your ability to set good boundaries. (Just because they have a problem doesn't mean you're the right guy for the job).
I know there's a lot of ways to run a business, and I know sometimes it's tempting to just bootstrap something because the client doesn't have funds, or because you want to be the 'answer' guy that can come up with some kind of a solution at least and keep the client totally 'in house', or because you like rabbit holes, or because of any other number of things... but think really carefully before you truly start to invest real hours into learning web development. Is web development ACTUALLY in line with where you see your business in 1 year? 5 years? Is this truly a marketable skill you want to master? It's easy to waste a few hundred hours over the next year cobbling together a skillset that's both second rate, and not even really congruent with your actual core offer. Or maybe it's even valuable, but it's not the most important skillset you could have spent this year mastering.
Personally, I think that's why partnerships with kick ass people is the best way to cover weak spots, but I'm not a good jack of all trades, so that's just my two cents. Either way, be jealous about your time here, this is a rabbit hole you don't want to go down with anything less than 100% intention. It's too easy to spin your wheels and look back and wonder where all the time went. If you're right though, and that with your business model it IS essential to know more about web dev, then treat this like a real education, and be serious about it. Find other experts to learn from, devote some part of every single day to improving your skill set, and don't slow down until you're one of the best in the city. (for local business consultants, that's a pretty low bar, for better or worse). I personally regret wasting as much time as I did on web dev, but c'est la vie. It does inform my decision making now, maybe even to a bigger extent than I think, so who knows?
To actually answer your question though... if you're already familiar with WP, stick with that. Cody's direction if you want to go that route sounds about right to me.
