In the 80s, Website Design was very time consuming & understandably very expensive. 
Software technology has improved at light speed.  Oddly, some Business are still 
paying the same price for websites they did 30 years ago !

Excerpt from article explaing that since browsers have been updateted, customers do not have to pay a lot for web design anymore:
"What we may not have realized is that once the browsers don’t suck, being an HTML and CSS “guru” isn’t really a very marketable skillset. 80% of what made us useful was the way we knew all the quirks and intracries of the browsers."

What used to take a coder 40 hours to do now can be done in 3 days.  Smart customers do not overpay. 



   Wordpress fad -
in 2006 Wordpress 'Blog site' software was released as a basic white page with the ability to add pictures. 
Some plugins are available to make a simple 'Website' and now all 12 year olds make a website in English class.  

Wordpress is the popular namedropper in 'trendy talk' now, for the same reason people settle for an inferior & more expensive 'Pandora' . . .  it doesn't have to make sense . . . "it's the rage". 


     Hosting Scam
In the 80s, there was far less competition.  Companies invented a ton of hidden charges. Companies charged $ 140 for a domain name, $ 14,000 for a website and a couple hundred a year for 'Hosting' and the company didn't do anything, not even updates..
Last time I checked, the internet is FREE. & now hardware is dirt cheap.