I learned Wagtail. Documentation, a couple of projects, the architecture. It is genuinely a good product.
Architecture on Django without magic. StreamField builds a page without "this is not supported". The admin looks decent, not like WordPress 2005. You can stretch it over a landing page or a multilingual portal. Open source, a living community, documentation that does not lie.
In 2012 you could live on this for years: implement, configure, maintain.
Something else changed since 2012. Corporate websites ended as a mass order.
Who left, and where they went
Small businesses, cafes, salons, consultants went to Tilda, a $59 WordPress theme, or a Carrd one-pager. Cheaper: $10-50 a month instead of $2000-5000 for a build. Faster: a weekend, not a month of approvals. Clearer: the client changes the text, they do not write "please fix the word on the homepage".
Most people need a picture that plugs a psychological hole: "I have a website, I am a serious business". Clean code and scalability do not sit in that conversation.
Tilda is closer to psychoanalysis than to engineering. Designers drew the templates. Animations out of the box. A wow for a person who does not care what a backend is. It hurt to admit. That did not make it false.
Shops went to Shopify. Courses to Teachable and GetCourse. Booking to Calendly. Mail to Mailchimp. Three clicks, a funnel, a support chat instead of "the developer is at sea, call back next week".
A hundred dollars a month is predictable for a client. Five thousand up front plus unknown maintenance is a risk.
The upper segment has money. It does not go to a freelancer with Wagtail. It goes to an agency with Gazprom in the portfolio, to Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore, to Contentful plus its own frontend team.
No word Enterprise in the name: the tender dies. No big brands in the cases: no trust. No sales department that walks the client for six months. You can build anything on Wagtail. That does not get you to the table.
Where Wagtail still lives
NHS and GOV.UK: history. The odd publisher. People who like Django and customization.
This is not "learned Wagtail, found ten clients". An electric car in 2000: technically better than petrol, no chargers, the buyer is not ready.
What people still buy
After Wagtail I said it to myself plainly: an "about the company" site is no longer a service I want to sell. They buy a change, automation, a join between tools, a product a person takes for themselves.
A gym app: memberships and reminders. A planner for a small team without Jira's weight. A calculator for a narrow niche. They pay differently than for a storefront. A subscription is possible. Fewer competitors: mobile still scares many builders.
Integrations: Telegram, a spreadsheet, mail. A morning report from five sources into Notion. A dashboard for a cafe: revenue, stock, popular dishes. One or two weeks of work, $500-2000, hours back to the client.
Not a Notion killer. A scheduler for barbershops, a tutor ledger, a crew estimate. A hundred to a thousand people with one pain. Salesforce will not take the barbershop.
I went into games not because "games are cool". Because a person buys a game for themselves. Godot, 2D, casual strategy, Steam as the aim. If it does not fire, the experience stays. There is no client in that loop.
A course, an architecture review, mentorship. Record, publish, sell again. One site for $2000 is two weeks and one client. A course for $200 is the same two weeks and a hundred buyers if the material lives.
Cold calls to companies that will go to Tilda anyway, I no longer make. That is a comfortable way not to sell and still feel busy.
A pity? Yes. Pity does not pay rent.
The corporate website market will not come back, because the lower segment is already on builders, the middle on SaaS, the top in tenders. Wagtail did not get worse. The buyers around it ran out.
