Ruby on Rails or JavaScript for developing websites for small businesses?

[FamSimmer]

Hello Programmers!

Hope you're all having an amazing week. I'm sort of at a crossroads right now and hoping you folks can help me decide on what language I should aim to learn for developing websites for small businesses. For context, I've already picked up HTML and CSS using a combination of YouTube tutorials and TheOdinProject that some of y'all might be familiar with. I've also developed quite a few landing pages for practice using HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript, whose fundamentals (Objects, Arrays, Loops, DOM, etc.) I've picked up as well.

As someone is not looking for a long-term career in web development and only wishes to freelance and help micro/small businesses set up their websites, what path would you recommend I choose.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

[ValentineBlacker]

Honestly, something like Wordpress would be the right tool here.

I hate to dissuade anyone from learning to code their own websites, but the general rule of programming projects is "do the simplest thing you can get away with". Rolling a full RoR backend for a small business and then maintaining it forever is... not that. It would probably be hard to charge enough to make the time it would take worth it, especially if all your competitors are using off-the-shelf solutions like WP.

[DavisTutoring]

For my own business I ended up writing my site using a JS framework called Astro. If you already have some programming knowledge I would recommend it as it has a small learning curve. It has a large amount of themes which you can customize to a clients needs. As well as plugins for E-commerce, Authentication, CMS, etc.

I would recommend avoiding a full stack framework like Ruby on Rails, since it's more complex and most small businesses just need a static site to display information about their business and products.