Started in 2009 as a Blogger blog about video game design/culture/psychology/philosophy (my most-read post was about quitting World of Warcraft[1] and was discussed on HN at the time[2]), it's now a (mostly) static site built in Hugo including the blog, my own developed games and a dev blog about them (only one game so far; that's a new part of the project), quick reviews of games I play, shared links to interesting articles/videos, and a blogroll of other recommended websites.
I'm very much a fan of "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", so I've been moving all of my content together under my own control. My articles also go to Medium, my games also go to itch.io, my shared links are also on Pinboard, etc., but everything is primarily on my own site and if any of the external services vanished I wouldn't lose anything.
It's been a great way to learn more web development tools and skills, and it's nice to have both "write something creative" and "tinker with site infrastructure" as project options depending on what kind of energy I have in my free time.
My pay increased when I transitioned from web dev at one company to product support at another - but to be fair, the first company was in Dallas and the second was in Palo Alto.
I haven't done a lot of comparison or asking my coworkers how much they make, but the information I do have suggests that while developers are commonly paid more on average, if you're at a company that actually values product support (often because it's recognized as an important contributor to customer retention) this difference can easily be dominated by other differences such as willingness to negotiate. Support teams are also usually smaller so it can be easier to demonstrate how much value you, personally, are adding.
But again, this assumes the company actually cares about support. There are definitely places that treat it as a revolving door position and won't pay much.
It's also worth noting that from what I've seen, companies are much more willing to have distributed support teams than dev teams, due to the value of having support availability in multiple timezones. I actually telecommute four days a week in my current role.
I was a web developer for a few years out of college, but I eventually realized I got much more pleasure out of helping my colleagues solve challenges in their own work (obscure bugs or browser compatibility issues) than building my own assigned pages and apps. I transitioned to technical product/developer support engineering which I've now done at two companies for a combined six years or so, and it's been great.
There's definitely more interaction with people, as your day-to-day work is more about helping people succeed than building things. But you still use a lot of the same skills you've built up in development work - especially if you've spent any time debugging code.
Whether this will appeal to you depends on what motivates you. For me, I really like feeling like I've made a difference and one of the most powerful ways to get that feeling is to solve a problem for someone, so this is a very satisfying line of work.
Also, I've done a lot of interviewing of candidates for this role - and I can tell you that at least on my team, lack of experience isn't really a blocker. It's common to need to quickly learn a new product or feature to solve a customer/developer's problem with it, so we look more for quick learning and problem-solving instincts than built-up experience or domain expertise.
Started in 2009 as a Blogger blog about video game design/culture/psychology/philosophy (my most-read post was about quitting World of Warcraft[1] and was discussed on HN at the time[2]), it's now a (mostly) static site built in Hugo including the blog, my own developed games and a dev blog about them (only one game so far; that's a new part of the project), quick reviews of games I play, shared links to interesting articles/videos, and a blogroll of other recommended websites.
I'm very much a fan of "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere", so I've been moving all of my content together under my own control. My articles also go to Medium, my games also go to itch.io, my shared links are also on Pinboard, etc., but everything is primarily on my own site and if any of the external services vanished I wouldn't lose anything.
It's been a great way to learn more web development tools and skills, and it's nice to have both "write something creative" and "tinker with site infrastructure" as project options depending on what kind of energy I have in my free time.
[1]: https://pixelpoppers.com/2010/12/doing-my-dailies-why-i-quit... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2054992