Is It Harder To Build A Successful Website Now?
The answer is yes. In many (but not all) respects building a successful website is more difficult now. Customer expectations about websites are higher than they used to be. Tolerance of poorly designed websites is lower. Competition for customers and traffic is much higher now. And it's all gotten more complicated, not just on the technical side, but on the business strategy side. You need to know this, because it means that being competitive on the Internet, and with a website means you need to think, and think a lot, before even the first line of code is written, or you choose a domain name.
To complete the picture, though, some things have changed for the better. People are much more comfortable buying things and services through websites, more and more companies are investing heavily in advertising on the Internet (and some of that revenue can end up in your pocket), and there are much better website development tools available, so that constructing a website "can" be done with less techical knowledge than before.
The bottom line is that if you want to have a business website, you MUST plan. Planning provides you with answers to questions that will help you develop a competitive edge over the thousands of other people and websites that are doing things similar to what you want to do.