> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
This is an all too common thought process among technologists, so:
Where to even start? Well, let's start that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping everything to try to avoid any unfortunate realizations about the emperor's clothes regarding their CapEx and finances. Yes, even your favorite one.
The very short version: running a small business like a restaraunt takes all your resources and then 20% more. Long hours, hard work, all your time. You do not have 2 hours to learn about LLMs or to pick which company to pay. From there:
* Most people don't know what they want
* Most people don't know the words for what they want
* Even if you say "I want a website", what do you want it do look like? To say? These people aren't experts in web UX nor should they be.
* You have some HTML and images. Where do they go now? Again people literally don't know what they want or need. If you realize you need a "web host", how do you pick a trustworthy one? How do you know if it's a good price? How do you get a domain name? How do you get the files onto the server?
* Do you want people to be able to buy things? Now you're taking payment methods and have security concerns.
* Your site is live. You want to change something on it. How do you do that? Where are the original files? How do you change them? How do you get the changes on the server?
It's not "Hey, write me a website". There are lots of steps that assume a lot of knowledge, and it is easier, faster, and better for people to focus on their expertise and just pay some service for their web shop.
I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7 days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily the least of their concerns.
I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free.
I have a web app that is a html document with an [edit] button at the end. It points at edit.html which has a textarea, a password field and a submit button. (Below is a list of links to all pages in the folder starting with index-) The textarea shows the middle chunk of the html document. You edit it, fill out the password (the browser will do it) and press the save button. It posts to save.php which constructs a new index.html and save a copy as index-2026-03-18.html The link to the copy shows up on edit.html The edit link there points to edit.html?file=index-2026-03-18.html if you save it that will become the new index.html (it refuses to edit anything that isn't "index-\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\.html")
If each menu entry is: `<tr><td>Beer</td><td>$3.50</td></tr>` They can just edit, delete or copy and paste it. Simply: `<br>Beer $3.50` Would work just as well. If they screw up they can put back an older version.
Put your phone number on the edit page. Write some html tags on a napkin. `<br> <b> <i> <h3> <img> <a>`
They want more pages? make the /about folder drop index edit and save.php into it, remind them to make a link to it on the front page and they will figure it out.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
I specifically tracked this problem and built https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of social media.
Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.
Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.
Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.
People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and Instagram now.
I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.
Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does.
Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.
I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS?
The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step.
I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian.
In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).
> I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step.
This has been a serious regression in the industry for a while: popular operating systems (I'm looking at you, Windows) don't encourage and are not set up for their users to program or even do the bare minimum of random automation unless it's embedded in an application and meant for automating just that application (excel macros).
You are encouraged and directed to install and use "apps" which are either a one-size-fits-all lowest common denominator or a tries-do-everything dog's breakfast frustration.
The Commodore 64 turned on instantly and said "READY." and effectively gave you a blank canvas to poke (no pun intended) at. It was BASIC, but it was a real (if simple and limited) programming language and you could get immediate feedback and satisfaction from playing with it to learn what it could do. The syntax of BASIC is simple, the stdlib is comprehensive and unopinionated. There was nothing to download to get started to try to get that initial dopamine hit and to start to realize the true power of what computers can do and what you could make them do.
If you want a better chance at getting someone excited about programming, there are much better places to start than VSCode. pico8, scratch, even the browser's developer toolbar is more accessible than VSCode.
Part of the problem is that there's no accepted standards for the minimum website worth making. This is very much a fault of the "website people" because they don't want to sell you a five page static site with the most complex feature being a php script that runs a couple for loops to put formatting around images and text.
Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need (as evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)
>Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need
I disagree with this popular notion. A website should be a fully functioning sales system, so that it helps ease the admin burden of a small business, and also helps them get more sales.
Take the most common small businesses: Restaurants and accommodation. Both of these can save/make thousands of dollars per year by having their own ordering systems on their websites.
As for the other small business which perform more bespoke services, it's good to have offerings for set prices on the website, just so that customers know what they can expect when contacting for a bespoke solution.
>> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.
I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you.
Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol
Yes. It’s also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with property listings, three days later.
Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.
It's just like with any other process. Want to get a visa to x country? Seems like an easy thing, but in many cases it isn't. That's why you contact a visa company. They do things for you to make it happen. It's not that what they do is too hard for you to do, it's about time.
It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer their business, and not connect often — I bet the security is more costly that a technical audience.
I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account, drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why is it so hard to have a static website now?
I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage. Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a domain name.
But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"
I think you are overestimating the knowledge of the average person. You still need to have an idea of what is html, DNS, cludflare. Most people wouldn't even know where to start looking. But I agree that once you know how to create a website, generating a landing page with Claude is painless.
Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for that but I've heard it used to be a thing)
Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?
Realistically, most people don't have the expertise of setting up HTTPS enabled web hosting on nginx (maybe Caddy will be easier.) There is just so much prerequisite knowledge for a non technical person to know. What they do instead is either
- Pay for a shared hosting plan on one of the big players like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostinger.
- Install wordpress in one click
- Do everything in Wordpress.
- Pray that no one ever hacks their Wordpress installation
Or
- Pay for an agency
- Have an IT professional — like you and me — make the website, and put a link in the website footer saying "website designed by XYZ Inc."
I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have a website in 2026. It doesn't need to be a fancy website, but does at least need a list of products, business hours, work samples, and contact info. If they don't have that, then I view it as an indication that other aspects of their business might also be lacking in professionality or high friction.
That being said, if they have a strong presence on Google Maps with plenty of positive reviews, photos, menus, hours, etc., then that's usually good enough for me. At least the info on Google Maps is publicly visible without logging in, and reasonably well organized. But even then, I do often find myself looking for the "Website" link on Google Maps and feeling frustrated when there isn't one.
Relying solely on Facebook or Instagram feels a bit to me like having an @aol.com email address back in the day.
I haven't built a basic website in years, so I'm a bit out of the loop, but I would probably go with Google Sites if I wanted to set up a simple business page. It's got a WYSIWYG editor, it's free, it has support for custom domains, and presumably it will play nicely with Google SEO.
I'm curious what you're looking for on a website that you can't otherwise find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram profile.
For a restaurant, as long as I can see a menu, I'm satisfied. Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are. Also I look for reviews on both Google and yelp. I know they can be gamed but I look for low reviews as well. Zero low reviews is a red flag imo.
For a professional business (dentist, lawyer, etc), I look for reviews and services provided. Sometimes this does necessitate a website, like I don't expect a Google map entry to delineate all services a lawyer provides. But if I'm just looking for a filling or a crown, then I can be fairly confident that every dentist provides that service.
If I'm looking for an auto mechanic, I just need to know that they service my car. I don't know much about cars but some places advertise that they work on Japanese cars and some that they work on European. I imagine most of them can work on everything though. I can usually glean this from their Yelp page.
I suppose my point is that not every business necessarily needs a website. Some could certainly benefit from one, but not every one.
> find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram profile.
Menu (with accurate prices - the ones on Google Maps is usually higher than the in-store prices).
I don't have an Instagram account. I can barely see anything on someone's profile.
> Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are.
No - these are horrible! Often incomplete/out of date, and with really marked up prices!
I recall going to a food cart one day. I asked for the menu. He said "Scan the QR code." And then added "Oh, but ignore the prices. That's for online orders and the actual prices are lower."
OK, so now I have to whip out my phone to view the menu in a sub-par format, and ask you about the prices for each one?
Websites are all independent and controlled by the owners of the restaurant or shop. They'll do what's in the interest of getting customers.
Google has a tangential set of goals: tying you to their product. Since they also own this gateway to the web, they can put their product at the top of every web search results page and slowly push the independent web farther and farther down. Nowadays, gee, business owners update their google maps entry more than their actual website. How strange that nobody was able to get a competitor off the ground either
It's so sad to me when we let this happen. That my mom doesn't know any better, yeah okay, but us hackers, whatever it is that 'hacker' stands for anymore
There's a business here, some kind of geocities for businesses
They don't need their own domain, it's all just subdomains or subpages like barber.businesshost.com or businesshost.com/barber
And nothing complicated, just an easy way to edit a single page, maybe change the colours and add a few images. Hell, drop any Markdown editor in there.
Specifically don't allow sub-pages, internal links, any kind of booking systems or webshops etc. Just a basic plain page with address, opening times, menu/prices if it's a place where that matters.
If they want anything more complex, they can go to Squarespace or something with all the bells and whistles.
You can host a service like this on a $5 VPS for a zillion companies, bill them $5/month and you'll be net-neutral on your first customer (- dev costs of course)
> I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have a website in 2026
from the article:
> If you’re a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant
these services definitely do not need a website
a luddite user just needs a way of getting basic information from where its already posted online. so this is a user experience problem, easily solved by an ai agent that takes whats posted on instagram, yelp, and google maps, and presents it to luddites in a way they are familiar with
Millennials delenda est. Or maybe Gen X. But definitely millennials. I am stockpiling champagne for when performative profanity goes to the grave with the silent generation against which it is still rebelling 70 years later. I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger. But yes, you should build a website.
You don’t always get to choose the restaurant. Sometimes your friends drag you places. Sometimes your sister in law wants to go take a photo of the Castro Theater and then get a cookie, and you find yourself in Hot Cookie calling a chocolate chip a Basic Bitch. I just think that these kinds of "perfect agency" gotchas ignore the tradeoffs of living an actual life.
Ironically, this kind of performative outrage (over a performative thing or not) is also very Gen X or millennial-coded. I can’t even. Take a chill pill.
While I'm perfectly capable of writing professionally, I have a mouth like a sailor when I'm speaking with people who are close to me. I sometimes choose to write the way I speak and I appreciate when others do so as well, assuming it comes off as genuine.
I think this person cares that much and wanted to convey their frustration. It worked for me. I thought it was excellent.
what is a "performative profanity"? A profanity which only goal is to be performed, said out loud? What other goals does a profanity have? I guess to hurt feelings of another person?
Basically to get the attention of others and distinguish oneself from the stiff formality of previous generations. It's a very common trope in the titles of self-help books written by millennials:
Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.
Well all the assets are with the old asses so the only thing left for the younger gens is creativity and humor. I’d make you eat a sloppy toppy burger too you little burger slut boomer bitch <3
This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.
What do you want the title to be? "Have a Website"?
No, that's missing the emphasis. "I Strongly Encourage Businesses to Have a Website"? There we go. That sounds bland enough to be regurgitated by your LLM of the week.
Enjoy your war on adjectives, I guess. It's certainly going to make the world more interesting. Jesus fucking christ.
'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.
I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.
Fun rant to read, but this is an entitled view. Not everyone has to have a website, or has to care about democratising the internet. If you don't want to do business with them just because you shun platforms, that's up to you. They may be doing just fine without your patronage.
> If you don't want to do business with them just because you shun platforms
I don't do business with them because I can't access their hours, menu, services, etc... I've had this happen a few times. I'm not avoiding these businesses because I'm a snob. It's because I literally can't access the information. So, I go back to google and find a business that provides the information I need to decide if the business meets my needs before traveling to their location.
If people wanted to have a website, they would. The truth of it all is that most people like the walled garden, the sandbox, etc. It's predictable, it's knowable with limited effort, and it creates the desired illusion for a nominal fee.
There is no revolution to be had, the people have made (and are continuing to make) their choice.
Perfect example is my local coffee shop that is 100% on Instagram only.
They've done amazingly well on just Instagram with the groups they are targeting. I doubt that a website would have any impact on their business. In fact Instagram gives them something much easier, more visual, and with a built in social feed (no need to setup a mailing list, just use Instagram).
"But it's a walled garden..." - Most people don't really care. And also, it's a coffee shop. If Instagram shutdown, they'd be on the next platform in a week and rebuilding the same following.
It's annoying to people like me, but don't see it changing anytime soon, and I can't really blame the business.
Nobody cares until the automated trust and safety bot bans an account for no apparent reason and you can't contact a human for help. Before that happens though, how do you get someone to care? I suppose it's risk management at that point. "What are the odds that I'll get inconvenienced by Instagram before the ROI on establishing on their platform pays out"
not 100% true - I know some friends that would like a website, just they haven't found the means to get one. Even WordPress can be somewhat complicated to setup sometimes.
IMO it comes down to making your stuff available without it being behind a login-wall, pay-wall, ad-wall etc. The big platforms have made it seductively easy to get started with little effort, but you rob yourself of audience by letting them lock up your content behind it. I hope we see a larger exodus of users who take the author's lead and escape the walled gardens.
Sometimes I get inspired to write something publicly, but then the fact that I'm providing another point of data to ChatGPTs training corpus which helps the american Department of War make shit memes about killing people - stifles that impulse pretty quickly.
I do think that's a factor now; Continual scraping to train LLMs means that even having your own website essentially just makes you another 'digital sharecropper'. The arguments about 'owning your own content' no longer have as much force.
The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to LLM training corpora.
It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.
Maybe we're not going to the same places but "just having a website for rates and hours" is a SAT problem for salons/tattoo parlors. They need to know what you want and also show flattering photos of what they can do (and also comply with the growing mountain of privacy regulations), determine if you have any staff preferences and when staff is available for whatever you're requesting, and compute the available times grid. If you just want a speedcut, that's not necessarily what those shops are optimizing for.
Even if they have the tech from an existing SaaS solution or from vibe coding, they still gotta diligently update the source data from staff. You can't blame anyone for giving up, posting their phone number and a few pictures on social media, and just writing reservations down on paper.
I really thought the article was about personal websites like in the 90s, not bringing up hair salons as an example.
A hair salon needs a presence on Google maps with a bunch of reviews and their rates and that's it. Sure they don't own it but until that works it works.
Locally I have an issue finding builders and electricians, because they don't have websites. They may have a listing in the phone book, but that's just "Bob's bricklaying", doesn't tell me a lot about whether or not Bob is actually a company, but I can call and ask. Sometimes they haven't had a company for years.
The preferred methods today seems to be Facebook for your average builder, Instagram if they feel like they do more upscale work. I'm on neither platform, so I have to resort to taking pictures of vans when I'm out and about.
I think the problem is that having a website is a bit complicated for a carpenter, but not enough business for a webdesign company to deal with.
Couldn't agree more. Worth pointing out that sites owned by Meta and Twitter in particular have become much more hostile to signed out users - often impossible to view a business' listing without a signed in account. Walled gardens are going to wall, of course. But I'm not sure how much small business owners realise that a proportion of traffic / interest has much more difficulty in finding them.
The thing that gets me is how many side projects and indie products only exist on Twitter or a GitHub readme. Like you built something cool but I have to scroll through your tweet history to understand what it does? Even a single page with a clear description, maybe a screenshot, and a link to try it would go so far. I recently launched a Chrome extension and the number of people who told me they almost did not try it because there was not enough info upfront was a wake up call.
What's wrong with a README? It's as close to a website as one can get within a self-contained repository, and is most likely to be kept up to date with any given version of the project. If there is one document available anywhere that describes a project, I would hope it is the README.
Beautiful photos! And the site is very nice looking too .
Can I ask what you do wrt the photo storage for your site? I'm looking to get back into photography and don't use Instagram etc, so want somewhere to post. Wondering how I might set up my own site for this purpose. Thanks
I have done the same, but your website is really nice! And your photos are lovely. I like how you've indicated which cameras and gear you use for certain trips.
That 600mm Sony lens must be fun to carry around. I used to have a Tamron 150-600mm lens for my Nikon, but my wife said it looked ridiculous, so I got rid of it. So now I'm mostly on M43 for portability.
I dont think its too bad! I have it on a peak design strap and have it on my back diagonally. It probably does look ridiculous, but im sure them camo outfit is just as bad as the camera!
Yes the OM-System stuff is awesome, i think its the only thing that would tempt me away from Sony
the camera data is all in the EXIF so it was pretty easy to do. Good olde CRUD apps are a joy to build now!
Great photos. I love your Norfolk robins. I also love that you've taken the time to set up browsing by species!
If you're at all interested in feedback:
- When scrolling through a gallery grid, the multiple fixed-position headers eat up an awful lot of screen real estate. On my MacBook Air (effectively 1280x800), I can only see one full row of photos at a time. Feels very cramped.
- Navigating to a photo from a gallery and then hitting my browser's “Back” button takes me back to the “Report” tab on the galley, not the photo grid. Makes gallery browsing pretty difficult.
- Maybe both of these problems could be ameliorated by making gallery photos open in the lightbox, rather than shunting you directly to their pages. Although...
- Items in a gallery's slideshow/lightbox display don't have a link to their photo pages. Maybe the name of the photo could link to its page?
Gorgeous photos. One point of feedback: I went to your shop to view prints, and while it was nice to see them "in situ", I couldn't see the actual images because of how they small they were in frame!
Great photos and I like how you show metadata, remind me of Flickr.
I think photography is one of the things that better to have website than use social media like Instagram. You can display your photos however you like and not to worry about platform limitations.
Government agency websites should host their own content on their own servers (why do so many cities use google drive sharing? my own even uses facebook links). No, I do not think I should have to participate in private companies' walledgardens... for basic citizen services/information.
This is as simple as (e.g.) in Chattanooga you cannot find out your trash/recycling schedule without using Google services. It shouldn't be necessary to whitelist private companies for government services.
Random pho restaurants (or whatever) are usually literal mom-and-pop shops and asking these people to put up (and maintain!) a website is usually too daunting for them. These are the places that tend to end up with only a facebook page or an insta.
It's just too hard for normies to DIY, and local "web dev firms" are usually predatory in their insistence on making decisions that require ongoing maintenance, because recurring revenue.
Just try to get your local web design firm to build you a static html-only site and hand you the creds for all the hosting, etc.
What random hair salons or coffee shops need is basically github pages with bring-your-own-domain, WYSIWG editing that works on mobile, and zero git. but AFAICT no such service exists.
One Google feature that I think is killing the internet is actually useful in this case - the AI summary. If your vital information is on a platform that I will never join, I can't see it directly. But Google can, and many times I can find what I need in the summary. Of course it's not perfect, like when I'm trying to find holiday hours.
What techies are missing is that AI doesn't make it possible for mom and pop shops to create and manage a website but it levels the playing field for enterprenuers. We can't expect plumbers and restaurant owners to spend 12+ hours fighting with AI website builders just to get a cookie cutter-website that is nothing more than a brochure. Nor can they fork thousands of dollars for web design agencies and spend months in mindless meetings. Thanks to AI now there is a way: small mom and pop local website builders can offer a white-gloves solution that scales and drives revenue for the SMBs.
They have already been doing that for 10-15 years via page builders and themes in Wordpress. It is easier now, but small players have had relatively decent tools for quite some time.
This is the kind of thing that feels obvious but apparently still needs to be said. I've seen businesses run entirely off an Instagram page, and when the algorithm changes or the account gets flagged, they lose everything overnight. No way to reach their customers, no archive of their work, nothing.
I mentor a couple folks that are either in college or just graduated.
They ask how to "get their name out there" in industries or domains where they either don't have a lot of experience or want to grow their career.
My first response is always: "Do you use social media? and do your socials point back to a blog or website showing your work?"
THEIR response is almost always "social media is toxic!"
To which I reply: "Some of social media is toxic. However, there are a LOT of smart folks online and the lifetime value of going from zero to even a single post about what you are into is enormous. This is especially true if what you put out there is niche and also highlights your value to the right people."
It's actually kind of sad that the needle against social media/websites has gone so far that the positives are being ignored by the younger generation.
Especially so as many people of my generation (Late Gen X/Early Millenials) have stories about how social media helped them get a job, make a great contact or join some group that benefited their life that they wouldn't have been a part of otherwise etc
Recently explained to a local service business owner that all she needed to do was get listed on Google maps and start asking customers for reviews. Literally showed her how competing businesses were top of the search results by doing just this.
Did she do it? No.
People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.
But websites are not everything. Everything would include updating the website with hours, menus, etc. And since way too many businesses in my part of the world (rural Virginia, though not sure that matters) can't update their hours, email, menus, etc. on socials, there is no way they can manage a website.
Lately, I've been trying to get restaurants, in particular, to share their news in text in addition to the graphic. They can't/won't do that. Why? Not sure and I don't care enough to ask. But I am not following them anymore and telling them why. Not sure they care, which is fine.
Yes, you should have a website if you have a business or you wish to maintain any public footprint on the internet.
But it is both simple and complicated to setup a website these days.
For a technical audience there are great tools/options to choose from. You can build a rock solid website serving tons of traffic using 3rd party hosting for cheap. But, there are lots of options and as a geek it's easy to get rabbit-holed in the process.
For non-technical users it's similar, many solutions that require minimal technical knowledge. But the technical knowledge is very leaky and most providers border on landlords seeking to extract their rent while holding users hostage.
I'm working on something small in a specific niche aimed at non-technical users. I worry a lot that I don't fully understand what keeps people from building their own site?
Every day on instagram I see people post pictures of text w/ words that are partially or fully obscured from view; presumably censoring themselves or others for the sake of the algorithm. Make a website, post what you like, be free.
Well fucking said. JavaScript was a fucking scourge upon the web as it convinced everybody that you need to know how to write an "app" to share text and jpegs, which we have been doing with the Document Object Model for literally decades.
Websites and HTML/CSS are documents. If you can write a Word document you can write a website. Death to walled gardens which have been the main locus of enshittification of the web.
If the CG-NAT problem can be solved one day I look forward to a rebirth of true P2P networking and information sharing with no central authority.
I think modern overlay networks can navigate CG-NAT fine now. Other options include free cloudflare, or just a wireguard tunnel to a free tier VPS. On a similar point, I don't think enough people talk about how most western home internet connections now also have similar bandwidth as entire datacentres had in the 2000's too.
We still take for granted how hard basic web technology is for people who don't consider themselves technology people though.
It depends. If there's a share id (?igsh=xxc) in the link usually no, but if you remove it usually yes. Opening more than a few posts/stories will result in a popup to sign in, but at least the core page and introduction should be visible.
it still forces you to log in when you scroll and you can't view any post iirc. Maybe solvable with ublock filters or some console commands but I haven't bothered
My two cents: I'd love to have a site. I've been involved with web technologies since the early/mid 2000s, when I built my first site in elementary school.
I've picked up hobbies since then that lend themselves well to sharing online, but right now, with the amount of LLM-related scraping happening, I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.
These bots make their own ground rules -- "just put up this special robots.txt thing" -- and then ignore them, requiring tools like Anubis to be created, maintained, and kept constantly up to date, and for what? So the plagiarism machine can plagiarise more? Copyright courts have apparently just checked out on this, so I'm not at all confident they'll do anything about this.
To be clear: my ego isn't so huge that I want my name plastered everywhere, on everything I've ever touched. I believe strongly in the principle of not getting your shit scraped online and then churned out into something that these LLM companies can (eventually? presumably?) profit off of (or at least turn into investment, in the short-term). These companies have done terrible things to the state of public discourse and I do what I can to avoid feeding the beast.
I haven't in a very long time, over a decade at this point.
A few friends and I have a small handful of self-hosted services that we all run on a VPN between our places with stuff like a recipe sharing app, etc., but the number of people with access to that is single digits.
In terms of "hosting anything," I still have my own homelab, and my self-hosting will be limited to this sort of stuff for the foreseeable. A cluster of limited-scope apps that helps me and a handful of friends keep in touch after moving out of our hometown, beyond just chatting in Signal groups.
I won't be putting up my own public website (or portfolio, or whatever; be it hosted on my own infra or not).
A few comments point out, and I agree, that setting up, never mind maintaining a webpage, has become a PITA:
- server (AWS? 10 optional services to config etc etc, config, updates etc)
- domain
- SSL cert
Are there solid providers who do it all-in-one? I pay one bill, get a domain, SSL certificate, renewed, and a managed, pre-configured Linux box, or even static hosting? Thinking of setting up a webpage for my consulting business and I'd rather not spend weeks fiddling with all this, or (shudder) use Wix.
Literally type "webhosting" into a search engine and every single provider that comes up will do that all-in-one. They'll also throw in a database and PHP, probably with an automatic installer for things like WordPress. There's a good chance your registrar will even try to upsell you the whole package.
Backblaze offers 10 GB of free storage and CloudFlare offers free data transfer from B2, with these two you can host a static site for free. I have a worker script that routes requests to the index page and sets cache headers for my site.
export default {
async fetch(req, env, ctx) {
// Cached response
let res = await caches.default.match(req);
if (res) return res;
// Fetch object from origin
let reqPath = new URL(req.url).pathname;
reqPath = reqPath.replace(/\/$/, ''); // Remove trailing slash
if (!reqPath.includes('.')) // Check file extension
reqPath += '/index.html'; // Default to index page
res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + reqPath);
if (res.status === 404) // Object not found
res = await fetch(env.ORIGIN + '/404.html');
// Configure content cache
res = new Response(res.body, res);
const ttl = res.headers.get('content-type').startsWith('text')
? 14400 : 31536000; // Cache text 4 hours, 1 year default
res.headers.set('cache-control', 'public, max-age=' + ttl);
// Cache and return response
ctx.waitUntil(caches.default.put(req, res.clone()));
return res;
},
};
You can use GitHub pages. Or just set up one virtual server and host everything on it - I do that and it's pretty painless. The "10 services on AWS" is definitely the most painful way there is.
Providers like Netlify, Firebase Hosting, CloudFlare are much better value for money for features for maintenance. Static hosting means you don't need to update the server because there isn't one, and there are even free tiers below a certain usage.
There's still the usability thing, they're not made for non-techies. There's an assumption you'll use Git, etc. But there's no practical reason why Netlify CMS or similar couldn't handle everything.
I have actually been experimenting with this. And it's real simple.
I think for these cases everyone should be shooting for a static site. In which case it is:
1. Rent a vps
2. Buy a domain
3. Set up nginx or something else
4. Copy files to the right folder
5. Point a dns record to said server
6. Use certbot to get an ssl cert installed for you
It's not that hard for you... the process you just described is unintelligible for 99% of the population I would say. And then you have to produce the content on top of that.
NearlyFreeSpeech might be what you want. Been using them for over a decade and still love them. They handle domains/DNS, hosting (static and other), mysql hosting, email forwarding, and much more. They also have great content policies, ie they only kick you off if you're breaking the law.
This has always been the case, not sure why you’d frame it as a recent development. Not that long ago you even had to PAY for an SSL cert. Domains are nothing new. You always needed a server.
It hasn't. TLS was not needed until recently. Non-TLS sites used to show up in search results. TLS was not mandatory at all. Also ISPs often provided users with a free webspace. So I could just send 1 html file to my host without much technical knowledge and I had a website that people could visit.
Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain name is like your home address in the physical world; not having one is like not being a citizen of civil society.
As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.
These days, it's pretty demoralising to run a website. Google AI overviews and LLMs have reduced traffic by over 60%, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. These numbers are typical.
At the same time, the cost and difficulty has raised because of misbehaving AI crawlers and bots attacking every moving part. I'm glad I went with static sites and not WordPress.
So you need to work harder and harder for a dwindling audience, and the cost of keeping the lights on keeps going up.
I used to make websites for businesses, a bit over a decade ago. The job feels just as hard now as it was back then. One notable exception is caddy and automatic SSL.
Same here. Even before AI, Google reduced my traffic all the time in favor of showing my competitors content, because they simply have a much larger footprint in the web as they started 5 years earlier. If you think about this twice, it means that the web (refereed to as Google search) is getting much less diversified, because Google acts as a positive funnel for already larger sites.
For some things I get this. Restaurants? Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers? I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work. I could care less if they have a website because that’s just marketing for them. I source almost 100% of these types of workers via referral from friends/family.
> Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers?
Plumbers and electricians: Maybe not. But lots of other house repairs stuff: Yes.
Things I want to see:
Geographical coverage area: Some are across town and are not willing to come to my property. Others are.
Services rendered: There job title may be very generic, but it often turns out they do only certain types of work.
Minimum fees: Some only do jobs that cost, say, $1000 or more. If my work is small, I shouldn't bother calling them.
> I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work
I do so as well, but they rarely pick up the phone. You call them, leave a voicemail, and pray they'll call you back at a time you can pick up. About 50% of them never call back. So every time I need some repairs/work done on the house, I have to get 10 "leads", and call them, leave a voicemail, and a few days later repeat the process because they either didn't call back, or called and said they don't do that type of work.
If I can pre-filter those out based on basic stuff on their website, it'd be great.
I used to work in construction in a previous life and always said I could judge how good a tradesman is simply by their appearance.
The same goes for their website. If they have pride in their work it will show; if they do just about enough to get paid it will also show.
Interesting. I'd personally rather them be great at what their job actually is and not waste time on a website. I think the best tradesmen don't need a website because their work (and their happy customers!) speaks for itself.
I'm all for personal website and these sentiments which regularly come up here around self hosting. This one seems a bit disproportionately confused and angry though.
If we're going to have any large aggregation or social media businesses where individuals trade data ownership for convenience, being able to put your opening hours and rates on the the internet without having to figure out how to have a website seems like the optimal use case.
I think we should aim for a sensible mid ground where social media provides just the things it provided before around 2011, like updates and communication with people you know and want to interact with already.
An "all personal websites" web that OP is calling for is just pushing the exclusion they feel onto the people they're complaining about.
We should have websites. We should also use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job, and running your own website isn't the best tool if you just want to get your business rates and opening hours on the web.
I dislike how this article handwaves its own recommendation away. The steps required to “have a fucking website” are so much more complex than they used to be. Mandatory† TLS is the biggest hurdle, because now there needs to be software running to renew your certs instead of just tossing some plain files up in a directory on an HTTP server that could run for years unattended. Gone are the days when it was easy for a website to outlive its author, and it's our fault!
† Yes, the fact that the world's most popular browser puts a big red NOT SECURE!!! warning next to any non-TLS website makes it mandatory regardless of the fact that plain HTTP still technically loads. Scareware works on people or they wouldn't do it.
i don't see how that's more of a hurdle than running an always-accessible web server -- for the average normie (plus managing dns in the first place etcetc)
i think the implication is "just use a web host" and i agree
if i was helping someone set up a website i'd either set them up with a WYSIWYG website builder-hoster a la wix (i'd have to google around for a specific one to try though) or if i had faith enough, i'd set them up with a workflow publishing to cloudflare pages; both would handle the domain and ssl for them
It is simply nuts how much people and businesses underestimate a good website.
If you're a small business of any kind, like a single person business, you can have tens of thousands of dollars in sales from just a good website and grow it to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years.
If you're an already established medium size business, you can boost your sales immensely, and reduce administration and customer support by 80%.
Yet, everybody is instead working their asses off to produce social media content and get more likes and followers, even though that doesn't translate well to real sales.
Businesses spend thousands to hire "influencers" and keep throwing in casino bets to Meta to "boost" their own posts. But paying for a good website is unthinkable, even in cases where there are guaranteed good returns.
You should be able to book your tattoo session directly on their website, so that the tattoo artist doesn't have to interrupt his work to answer phone calls from people wanting to schedule.
I don’t understand why people think it’s so difficult to build a website. If you let go of the idea that every little site has to look ‘modern’ and have thousands of features, it’s really easy. Stallman’s website would be a good example. It’s super minimalist, and there’s nothing stopping a restaurant from building a site like that too. The homepage can simply list the opening hours and special offers, and then have a subpage listing the regular menu. All you need is HTML and a Server. If you don't want to rent one just buy a Raspberry Pi and host it at the restaurant or at home. Even if you don’t know much about technology, you can always ask a computer science student or a friend’s child to do it for a bit of pocket money.
Yeah. "put some HTML on a server" may as well say "split a few atoms" for people who have never done so.
No one is saying that it's impossible to learn all that stuff. But it takes time, has a fairly high entry barrier (despite LLMs and all that), and needs to happen _while_ keeping the business afloat.
Instead of focusing on why having a website is better for customers (100% it is), the article is really an attack on... developers at Meta and tech other companies? I love a good profanity laced rant, but the entire article reads unfocused and unpersuasive.
Countless hours? Get someone to make you a webpage, they can use Wix or Shopify or something like this. It’s never been easier or cheaper. In the grand scheme of running a business, it’s one of the best effort:return ratios you can find.
+1 I can’t even delete my old stuff on HN. I don’t own my comments here. In contrast, I can go ahead and delete any of my Facebook posts or comments from 10 years ago. In a way, HN is more hostile than Facebook.
x is arguable better than twitter ever was and most arguments are just political bias or elon hate. i feel like x is just as far-right and just as far-left as you make it now because the feed is tuned by engagement and followers, people who call it out or refuse to participate are just using emotionally politically charged points that are mostly untruthworthy because they are not objectionable. i find x to be the closest thing to a truly open platform now minus the expensive api costs and some other annoyances with premium etc(there are ways around it).
when you consider that they don't ban stuff only in rare cases of it being illegal content, articles are clean and easy and have real reach if you know what you are doing, no particular ideology is governing the platform other than if you just don't like elon and you refuse to participate. it's far better than it was prior and i have been a user of twitter/x since 2013. i really enjoy talking to the many people around the globe on x (mostly japanese which have a very rich X community).
that all being said, social media is a contagion for the masses, and i still run 3 sites regardless of having an x account(i deleted instagram,facebook, never used tiktok).
The aside about mailing lists is well made: with the exception of SMS, email is the one method of customer contact not mediated by big tech networks (save arguably Gmail) and portable across service providers. In games it’s the best way to keep in touch with players, much better than discord where the dots accumulate and most members ignore most server updates and notifs.
Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
And please, find an alternative to discord for your community.
It baffles me that everyone has collectively decided it's a great idea to have discussions on a platform which is not indexable, and has no usable search even when you're in it.
i have my own personal website which i customized to my own liking (catppuccin theme, walking pet, music player [with animations and iOS-like blur effects], etc.) and even added a tiny blog section, where i usually post, well, anything i'd post on traditional, centralized social media.
i made it so, if something is relevant enough (i.e. it is something i'm actually proud of, or is something with enough quality), it is posted on my site first, and just then reposted to other platforms. i even added a rss feed if anyone wanted.
and last but not least, i optimized it so it loads within less than 512kb (333kb as of writing this, i might add or remove more stuff in the future that might change the total size), and it is fully functional on devices as old as Android 6 (i don't have anything older to test, sorry about that).
Set up a website — and while you’re at it, start a mailing list, because email is basically the only means of reaching your contacts that can’t easily be taken away from you.
I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!
Platforms have always been liabilities.
First you trade privacy for convenience, and soon after, you trade ownership for reach, and ultimately you lose both.
Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.
You‘re absolutely right. (I‘m not an LLM ;-)) And the fact that (I‘m looking at you, LinkedIn!) platforms actively block people from using external links is a good warning sign.
Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.
Easier said than done, and completely ignoring the intricacies of "just have a website".
I can write the html, CSS, JavaScript needed for a website, I can spin up a local web server to serve these files, but setting up an internet facing website, no. No clue how to go about it, how to secure it, and how to maintain it.
Give me a step by step guide that is simple, and can ensure security and privacy, and I'll have a website. But until then I'll use what's convenient.
As an engineer and self-hosting and self-coding enthusiast, I would agree with a lot of the points. I have spent most of my life in IT advocating for decentralization and democratization.
However, as someone who has had enough experience in the real world to notice how different time and skill constraints lead to different requirements for outsourcing, I think that it sounds elitist. Even an LLM is not sufficient for people who don't even know the difference between backend and frontend or what an API is, and therefore don't stand a chance to craft a proper prompt, let alone properly test the code that the LLM produces.
For context, I could also tell Mr. "Having a fucking website" that they're a hypocrite because they run a blog on Wordpress and have a social media account on mastodon.social. Those who really believe in decentralization run their own stuff, or code their own blogging platform like I did. They don't just brag of how morally superior they are just because they deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Of course I would sound elitist. And that's exactly how their stance sounds to the average bakery shop owner.
A takeaway thought: find orgs you use or know of and suggest they get a website if the don't have one or to improve it if they do (could even be a simple web dev biz)
I don't understand this. There are super cheap shared-hosting plans the allow you to just do a couple clicks to install WordPress with full control. Then about $13/yr for a .com with no trouble with SSL or Google.
On one hand, I totally agree, as I'm all for indie small web. Haven't used Facebook and Instagram for years. On the other hand, it's not (small) business owners deliberately choose to not have a website, it's customers saying it's too much friction for anything outside of FB or IG. For some people if you are not on IG you do not exist, no matter how nice your website is.
I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses don't have websites:
It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.
Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.
So how do I do that? I can't host it easily on the machine in the office because NAT and dynamic IPs have trained us that this is not really possible (it is, buty you have to know what you're doing).
Pay a hosting provider, but who? Do I need to buy an SSL certificate, because we decided we need HTTPS everywhere for some reason? What about if my site gets DDOSed? Do I get charged more?
So I can use something free like Github Pages, but now I'm under a different tech overlord, no?
I can see why people just say screw it and go back to IG/FB. The web is too complicated now.
I think many people here are overthinking it. OP is mostly talking about simple business website not huge platforms to host.
Ddos protection is kind of irrelvant for such small projects. But anyhow there are so many local hosting companies (europe) for at least the last 10 years that provide a free ssl cert, one-click options for wordpress etc. It’s really not that complicated.
Irrelevant nerd myopia. They mostly just paid someone to do it (until they decided "wordpress guy" was not worth the marketing budget). If anything DYI is easier than ever.
This matches exactly what I see building software for small merchants
in the GCC. A coffee shop owner in Riyadh is working 14 hour days.
The barrier isn't technical ability or even cost. It's that every
solution requires context they don't have and time they don't have.
The products that work are the ones where the merchant never has to
think about the technology at all. They just see customers coming back.
The old internet isn’t coming back. Yea you could setup a little old school page but you won’t have visitors. So what’s the point? Better to post a blog post on instagram as pictures where you get more reach, instead of a website where no one really cares.
If running a little website meant you’d actually get an audience, people would do it. But it doesn’t happen, we can see the traffic stats. And so, there’s just better things to do with your time and life than maintain a website no one goes to. That’s just the reality. I’d argue your better off handwriting a little journal, at least then you get the pleasure of holding a physical object you filled with thoughts.
And while we're at it, make sure it works everywhere and is accessible. Luckily this is easy to do, just don't clutter it up with a bunch of nonsense frontend frameworks.
The point is to tell people about your business, not show off your design skills. If you have a blind client on a 30 year old computer, they should still be able to use your website to get information about your business.
It's great in principle. However, in the past decade I've never visited even one single restaurant's website. I just check menus and phone numbers on google map. I trust google map photos (not saying they're 100% reliable) much more than a site owned by the restaurant's owner anyway.
The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links.
The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.
A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.
He specifically says "if your are a business, an individual artist or creator". They aren't saying everyone, just people who have the potential to benefit from it. Not a blog site, basically they're advocating for personal portfolio sites and contact points. Having 5 social sites you might be contacted through is a pain that often means commission or work requests simply get missed.
"If you're a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant, or whatever, please just have a fucking website where I can go and see your rates and hours."
It's true there are some businesses that only publish rates and hours on Facebook
But it's probably relatively small number
Given the choice between (a) a business that has a listing accessible via yellowpages.com, Google Maps, etc. and (b) one that has a social media account but no listing in any business directory, it stands to reason that there will be more opportunities to choose (a) than (b)
There are also other reasons to prefer (a) to (b) besides avoiding Facebook of course
This is kinda why the (fucking) platforms that you hate exist.
Small business wants a presence on the internet for reasons.
Originally, small business would have to pay $$$ to engage an expert, who will assist them in creating a website, hosting it, keeping it secure, keeping it up to date, figuring out the SEO to make it findable, etc.
It's obvious given 3s of thought that this sucks for a non-technical small business owner and can be optimised, so someone creates a platform to enable non-technical small business owners to do most of this without the cost/hassle of dealing with experts and owning the website themselves. This gets you to somewhere like MySpace, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, even Blogger, etc. But of course, such offerings aren't stable - they change, fail, or enshittify over time.
Facebook also sees an opportunity, and businesses start creating their own Facebook pages. Easy, and maybe even great for a while; except you're even more locked into the platform, only people who use Facebook can engage with you, and then trends move on and Facebook is less popular with your customer base than it once was.
You also want more of a visual presence to show off your cupcakes, or whatever. So an Instagram page.
TL;DR: there's no perfect solution for non-techies with a business. You either have a fucking website with all of the cost, hassle, and friction that comes with that, or you choose one of platforms that simplifies this but comes with unpredictable downsides over time.
well said. nothing more to be added here. have a fucking website. especially without dependency on third parties that if blocked it won't load - like fonts, cdns, captchas... and better jet, don't make it SPA if you don't have to. stick to basic html.
> The concept of congregating in walled gardens owned by pedophilic fascist speed freaks
Are we really calling everyone we don't like a pedophilic fascist now? I honestly had really hoped that this sort of polarized, low-quality content wouldn't make it onto HN. :(
If you think that everyone who works on a website that is a walled garden is a "pedophile fascist", I don't know what to say to you -- I don't think we live in the same reality.
If you prefer ai slop, let me introduce you to moltbook! Some of the ai agents there were even trained by humans being paid by pedophilic fascist speed freaks, so they tend to be more amenable to that sort of thing than your typical human.
Someone wrote and deleted a comment saying
> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
This is an all too common thought process among technologists, so:
Where to even start? Well, let's start that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping everything to try to avoid any unfortunate realizations about the emperor's clothes regarding their CapEx and finances. Yes, even your favorite one.
The very short version: running a small business like a restaraunt takes all your resources and then 20% more. Long hours, hard work, all your time. You do not have 2 hours to learn about LLMs or to pick which company to pay. From there:
* Most people don't know what they want
* Most people don't know the words for what they want
* Even if you say "I want a website", what do you want it do look like? To say? These people aren't experts in web UX nor should they be.
* You have some HTML and images. Where do they go now? Again people literally don't know what they want or need. If you realize you need a "web host", how do you pick a trustworthy one? How do you know if it's a good price? How do you get a domain name? How do you get the files onto the server?
* Do you want people to be able to buy things? Now you're taking payment methods and have security concerns.
* Your site is live. You want to change something on it. How do you do that? Where are the original files? How do you change them? How do you get the changes on the server?
It's not "Hey, write me a website". There are lots of steps that assume a lot of knowledge, and it is easier, faster, and better for people to focus on their expertise and just pay some service for their web shop.
I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
30 replies →
"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading.
Otherwise, totally agree.
7 replies →
Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
16 replies →
To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7 days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily the least of their concerns.
I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free.
I have a web app that is a html document with an [edit] button at the end. It points at edit.html which has a textarea, a password field and a submit button. (Below is a list of links to all pages in the folder starting with index-) The textarea shows the middle chunk of the html document. You edit it, fill out the password (the browser will do it) and press the save button. It posts to save.php which constructs a new index.html and save a copy as index-2026-03-18.html The link to the copy shows up on edit.html The edit link there points to edit.html?file=index-2026-03-18.html if you save it that will become the new index.html (it refuses to edit anything that isn't "index-\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\.html")
If each menu entry is: `<tr><td>Beer</td><td>$3.50</td></tr>` They can just edit, delete or copy and paste it. Simply: `<br>Beer $3.50` Would work just as well. If they screw up they can put back an older version.
Put your phone number on the edit page. Write some html tags on a napkin. `<br> <b> <i> <h3> <img> <a>`
They want more pages? make the /about folder drop index edit and save.php into it, remind them to make a link to it on the front page and they will figure it out.
6 replies →
Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
I specifically tracked this problem and built https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of social media.
Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.
Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.
Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.
18 replies →
People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and Instagram now.
I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.
15 replies →
Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
5 replies →
Most people should put in a Google maps entry
7 replies →
Yeah, you could even just serve a pdf at the root path, that wouldn't even require any HTML.
I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?
4 replies →
The issue is priorities.
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
6 replies →
I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds.
I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.
I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS?
The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
5 replies →
My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step.
I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian.
In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).
> I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step.
This has been a serious regression in the industry for a while: popular operating systems (I'm looking at you, Windows) don't encourage and are not set up for their users to program or even do the bare minimum of random automation unless it's embedded in an application and meant for automating just that application (excel macros).
You are encouraged and directed to install and use "apps" which are either a one-size-fits-all lowest common denominator or a tries-do-everything dog's breakfast frustration.
The Commodore 64 turned on instantly and said "READY." and effectively gave you a blank canvas to poke (no pun intended) at. It was BASIC, but it was a real (if simple and limited) programming language and you could get immediate feedback and satisfaction from playing with it to learn what it could do. The syntax of BASIC is simple, the stdlib is comprehensive and unopinionated. There was nothing to download to get started to try to get that initial dopamine hit and to start to realize the true power of what computers can do and what you could make them do.
If you want a better chance at getting someone excited about programming, there are much better places to start than VSCode. pico8, scratch, even the browser's developer toolbar is more accessible than VSCode.
Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
1 reply →
Part of the problem is that there's no accepted standards for the minimum website worth making. This is very much a fault of the "website people" because they don't want to sell you a five page static site with the most complex feature being a php script that runs a couple for loops to put formatting around images and text.
Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need (as evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)
>Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need
I disagree with this popular notion. A website should be a fully functioning sales system, so that it helps ease the admin burden of a small business, and also helps them get more sales.
Take the most common small businesses: Restaurants and accommodation. Both of these can save/make thousands of dollars per year by having their own ordering systems on their websites.
As for the other small business which perform more bespoke services, it's good to have offerings for set prices on the website, just so that customers know what they can expect when contacting for a bespoke solution.
2 replies →
I saw a meme one time that went something like this:
"AI is so cool, I asked ChatGPT to combine a card game with a flight simulator and it did it!"
"Yeah, that is pretty cool I guess."
"My question for you is, what do I do with the code it gave me?"
"What?"
"Where do I put the code to make a game?"
Just ask ChatGPT for that too, it'll happily walk you through standing up Unity or whatever.
1 reply →
I read comments such as:
>> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?
as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.
I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you.
Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol
Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?
Yes. It’s also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with property listings, three days later.
Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
1 reply →
The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.
Yes!
It's just like with any other process. Want to get a visa to x country? Seems like an easy thing, but in many cases it isn't. That's why you contact a visa company. They do things for you to make it happen. It's not that what they do is too hard for you to do, it's about time.
I’ve built websites for clients. Some of those clients were restaurants and small businesses. Often professionals.
Send any of them a list of 5 questions, the likelihood that you get 5 answers is close to nil.
These people might be good at what they do, but a website might as well be city planning to them.
Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.
Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.
8 replies →
It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer their business, and not connect often — I bet the security is more costly that a technical audience.
There is now platforms that make it as easy as social media sites. wordpress shopify etc
Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.
I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account, drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why is it so hard to have a static website now?
Neocities is picking up the slack: https://neocities.org/
1 reply →
You may like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772
I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage. Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a domain name.
But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"
I think you are overestimating the knowledge of the average person. You still need to have an idea of what is html, DNS, cludflare. Most people wouldn't even know where to start looking. But I agree that once you know how to create a website, generating a landing page with Claude is painless.
2 replies →
I miss those cheap something-middle-in-webhosts-and-microblogs hosts
Reminds me a little of something I wrote once:
https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/
Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.
Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)
3 replies →
Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for that but I've heard it used to be a thing)
2 replies →
Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?
14 replies →
And security
Most of these people just need like two or three static pages and a domain name. Same as it ever was.
I accept that as a software developer, I have a myopic view on it, but it doesn't have to be hard.
- Get a domain name
- Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed
- Write a plain text file with the info you want shown (hours, contact info, etc...)
Yeah it's not sexy, but it's a start and it can be changed when time and interest allows.
How do I get a domain name? What is a VPS? What the hell is nginx? How do I write a plain text file in Word? I don't have time for this ...
3 replies →
Realistically, most people don't have the expertise of setting up HTTPS enabled web hosting on nginx (maybe Caddy will be easier.) There is just so much prerequisite knowledge for a non technical person to know. What they do instead is either
- Pay for a shared hosting plan on one of the big players like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostinger.
- Install wordpress in one click
- Do everything in Wordpress.
- Pray that no one ever hacks their Wordpress installation
Or
- Pay for an agency
- Have an IT professional — like you and me — make the website, and put a link in the website footer saying "website designed by XYZ Inc."
1 reply →
> Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed
You probably already lost 90% of 'normies'.
Most people won't be able to or willing to do that on their own. They could learn it of course, but they don't bother.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
7 replies →
That's not realistic for non-developers.
However, anybody can easily get a website: Just send an e-mail or make a call to any of the myriad web design people in your local area.
How are you going to convince your ie hair salon? Being cheeky but I imagine the conversation is going to go like:
- "What the heck is a domain name"
- "What the heck is a vps"
Probably going to doze off by the time you get to explaining an http server.
Don't get me started on the "plain text file". A website that looks like notepad.exe from '95?
It's worse than not sexy, most users would think the website got hacked or something. And I'm not teaching my hair stylist CSS
The VPS should just be their home router, and then have the ISP provide the domain name.
Uploading the web site could be a discovered Samba or NFS share.
Hopefully IPv6 can make self hosting viable again.
[dead]
[dead]
I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have a website in 2026. It doesn't need to be a fancy website, but does at least need a list of products, business hours, work samples, and contact info. If they don't have that, then I view it as an indication that other aspects of their business might also be lacking in professionality or high friction.
That being said, if they have a strong presence on Google Maps with plenty of positive reviews, photos, menus, hours, etc., then that's usually good enough for me. At least the info on Google Maps is publicly visible without logging in, and reasonably well organized. But even then, I do often find myself looking for the "Website" link on Google Maps and feeling frustrated when there isn't one.
Relying solely on Facebook or Instagram feels a bit to me like having an @aol.com email address back in the day.
I haven't built a basic website in years, so I'm a bit out of the loop, but I would probably go with Google Sites if I wanted to set up a simple business page. It's got a WYSIWYG editor, it's free, it has support for custom domains, and presumably it will play nicely with Google SEO.
I'm curious what you're looking for on a website that you can't otherwise find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram profile.
For a restaurant, as long as I can see a menu, I'm satisfied. Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are. Also I look for reviews on both Google and yelp. I know they can be gamed but I look for low reviews as well. Zero low reviews is a red flag imo.
For a professional business (dentist, lawyer, etc), I look for reviews and services provided. Sometimes this does necessitate a website, like I don't expect a Google map entry to delineate all services a lawyer provides. But if I'm just looking for a filling or a crown, then I can be fairly confident that every dentist provides that service.
If I'm looking for an auto mechanic, I just need to know that they service my car. I don't know much about cars but some places advertise that they work on Japanese cars and some that they work on European. I imagine most of them can work on everything though. I can usually glean this from their Yelp page.
I suppose my point is that not every business necessarily needs a website. Some could certainly benefit from one, but not every one.
> find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram profile.
Menu (with accurate prices - the ones on Google Maps is usually higher than the in-store prices).
I don't have an Instagram account. I can barely see anything on someone's profile.
> Even if it's a menu on DoorDash or whatever other menu apps there are.
No - these are horrible! Often incomplete/out of date, and with really marked up prices!
I recall going to a food cart one day. I asked for the menu. He said "Scan the QR code." And then added "Oh, but ignore the prices. That's for online orders and the actual prices are lower."
OK, so now I have to whip out my phone to view the menu in a sub-par format, and ask you about the prices for each one?
No thanks.
> I'm curious what you're looking for on a website that you can't otherwise find on a well organized Google Map page or Instagram profile.
If you don’t have an Instagram account, you can’t find anything on an Instagram profile.
Or in my case, I just call them.
> At least the info on Google Maps is publicly visible without logging in
Ah yeah enjoy that while it lasts. https://9to5google.com/2026/02/18/google-maps-limited-view-s... found via https://tweakers.net/nieuws/244948/google-test-beperking-inf...
Websites are all independent and controlled by the owners of the restaurant or shop. They'll do what's in the interest of getting customers.
Google has a tangential set of goals: tying you to their product. Since they also own this gateway to the web, they can put their product at the top of every web search results page and slowly push the independent web farther and farther down. Nowadays, gee, business owners update their google maps entry more than their actual website. How strange that nobody was able to get a competitor off the ground either
It's so sad to me when we let this happen. That my mom doesn't know any better, yeah okay, but us hackers, whatever it is that 'hacker' stands for anymore
There's a business here, some kind of geocities for businesses
They don't need their own domain, it's all just subdomains or subpages like barber.businesshost.com or businesshost.com/barber
And nothing complicated, just an easy way to edit a single page, maybe change the colours and add a few images. Hell, drop any Markdown editor in there.
Specifically don't allow sub-pages, internal links, any kind of booking systems or webshops etc. Just a basic plain page with address, opening times, menu/prices if it's a place where that matters.
If they want anything more complex, they can go to Squarespace or something with all the bells and whistles.
You can host a service like this on a $5 VPS for a zillion companies, bill them $5/month and you'll be net-neutral on your first customer (- dev costs of course)
> I definitely view it as a red flag if a business doesn't have a website in 2026
from the article:
> If you’re a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant
these services definitely do not need a website
a luddite user just needs a way of getting basic information from where its already posted online. so this is a user experience problem, easily solved by an ai agent that takes whats posted on instagram, yelp, and google maps, and presents it to luddites in a way they are familiar with
Millennials delenda est. Or maybe Gen X. But definitely millennials. I am stockpiling champagne for when performative profanity goes to the grave with the silent generation against which it is still rebelling 70 years later. I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger. But yes, you should build a website.
"Millenniales delendi sunt." Now, write it out a hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise...
I daren’t ask “What have Millennials ever done for us?” because I have a suspicion that it would be a surprisingly unfunny answer.
5 replies →
looks up latin conjugation chart
fuck this i'll learn mandarin instead
3 replies →
> I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger.
Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
You don’t always get to choose the restaurant. Sometimes your friends drag you places. Sometimes your sister in law wants to go take a photo of the Castro Theater and then get a cookie, and you find yourself in Hot Cookie calling a chocolate chip a Basic Bitch. I just think that these kinds of "perfect agency" gotchas ignore the tradeoffs of living an actual life.
23 replies →
Ironically, this kind of performative outrage (over a performative thing or not) is also very Gen X or millennial-coded. I can’t even. Take a chill pill.
> is also very Gen X or millennial-coded. I can’t even.
irony, much?
1 reply →
No.
1 reply →
> performative profanity
While I'm perfectly capable of writing professionally, I have a mouth like a sailor when I'm speaking with people who are close to me. I sometimes choose to write the way I speak and I appreciate when others do so as well, assuming it comes off as genuine.
I think this person cares that much and wanted to convey their frustration. It worked for me. I thought it was excellent.
You will be forced to watch Firefly for eternity. Millenials will rule the internet for a 1000 years (a millenia).
Only because the internet for the next thousand years will only be bots, which stopped getting new training material after everyone else went outside.
Firefly, Dr. Who, Sherlock, on repeat. My own personal circle of hell.
what is a "performative profanity"? A profanity which only goal is to be performed, said out loud? What other goals does a profanity have? I guess to hurt feelings of another person?
Basically to get the attention of others and distinguish oneself from the stiff formality of previous generations. It's a very common trope in the titles of self-help books written by millennials:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/ceecki/book_t...
Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.
1 reply →
cringe >>> performative blandness
have a fkin boring substack, write abt your car (whimsy typo, not cringe like "doggo")
Well all the assets are with the old asses so the only thing left for the younger gens is creativity and humor. I’d make you eat a sloppy toppy burger too you little burger slut boomer bitch <3
This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.
What do you want the title to be? "Have a Website"?
No, that's missing the emphasis. "I Strongly Encourage Businesses to Have a Website"? There we go. That sounds bland enough to be regurgitated by your LLM of the week.
Enjoy your war on adjectives, I guess. It's certainly going to make the world more interesting. Jesus fucking christ.
It could be "Please, I beg of you, have a website" or "For the love of God, have a website" or even "AAAHHHHH JUST HAVE A WEBSITE ALREADY"
Many ways exist to cover all ranges of emotions without resorting to a purely cosmetic "fuck"
'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.
I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.
Fun rant to read, but this is an entitled view. Not everyone has to have a website, or has to care about democratising the internet. If you don't want to do business with them just because you shun platforms, that's up to you. They may be doing just fine without your patronage.
> If you don't want to do business with them just because you shun platforms
I don't do business with them because I can't access their hours, menu, services, etc... I've had this happen a few times. I'm not avoiding these businesses because I'm a snob. It's because I literally can't access the information. So, I go back to google and find a business that provides the information I need to decide if the business meets my needs before traveling to their location.
You can't even find a phone #? How about calling and asking? How do you know this place even exists without any information?
This is the opposite of old man yelling at clouds, it's young people complaining about the dumbest shit.
If the article writer is reading this, I feel the opposite. No, I don't want 1000 different websites. I like to use consolidated feeds.
No More Websites!
17 replies →
If people wanted to have a website, they would. The truth of it all is that most people like the walled garden, the sandbox, etc. It's predictable, it's knowable with limited effort, and it creates the desired illusion for a nominal fee.
There is no revolution to be had, the people have made (and are continuing to make) their choice.
This is technology at scale, for better or worse.
Perfect example is my local coffee shop that is 100% on Instagram only.
They've done amazingly well on just Instagram with the groups they are targeting. I doubt that a website would have any impact on their business. In fact Instagram gives them something much easier, more visual, and with a built in social feed (no need to setup a mailing list, just use Instagram).
"But it's a walled garden..." - Most people don't really care. And also, it's a coffee shop. If Instagram shutdown, they'd be on the next platform in a week and rebuilding the same following.
It's annoying to people like me, but don't see it changing anytime soon, and I can't really blame the business.
Nobody cares until the automated trust and safety bot bans an account for no apparent reason and you can't contact a human for help. Before that happens though, how do you get someone to care? I suppose it's risk management at that point. "What are the odds that I'll get inconvenienced by Instagram before the ROI on establishing on their platform pays out"
3 replies →
not 100% true - I know some friends that would like a website, just they haven't found the means to get one. Even WordPress can be somewhat complicated to setup sometimes.
Anecdotal only
IMO it comes down to making your stuff available without it being behind a login-wall, pay-wall, ad-wall etc. The big platforms have made it seductively easy to get started with little effort, but you rob yourself of audience by letting them lock up your content behind it. I hope we see a larger exodus of users who take the author's lead and escape the walled gardens.
Sometimes I get inspired to write something publicly, but then the fact that I'm providing another point of data to ChatGPTs training corpus which helps the american Department of War make shit memes about killing people - stifles that impulse pretty quickly.
I do think that's a factor now; Continual scraping to train LLMs means that even having your own website essentially just makes you another 'digital sharecropper'. The arguments about 'owning your own content' no longer have as much force.
The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to LLM training corpora.
It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.
2 replies →
The same could be said about posting anything publicly though, including our comments.
your (or anyone's) pre-training data isn't really useful so don't worry, people overestimate the utility of unstructured data
I have the same feeling paying for LLMs, it sucks we are financing genocide tools used by guys who are blackmailed with Epstein movies.
Maybe we're not going to the same places but "just having a website for rates and hours" is a SAT problem for salons/tattoo parlors. They need to know what you want and also show flattering photos of what they can do (and also comply with the growing mountain of privacy regulations), determine if you have any staff preferences and when staff is available for whatever you're requesting, and compute the available times grid. If you just want a speedcut, that's not necessarily what those shops are optimizing for.
Even if they have the tech from an existing SaaS solution or from vibe coding, they still gotta diligently update the source data from staff. You can't blame anyone for giving up, posting their phone number and a few pictures on social media, and just writing reservations down on paper.
I really thought the article was about personal websites like in the 90s, not bringing up hair salons as an example.
A hair salon needs a presence on Google maps with a bunch of reviews and their rates and that's it. Sure they don't own it but until that works it works.
To make it easier for you, this is the third sentence in TFA:
> But still, please, if you are a business or an individual artist or creator, have a fucking website.
Locally I have an issue finding builders and electricians, because they don't have websites. They may have a listing in the phone book, but that's just "Bob's bricklaying", doesn't tell me a lot about whether or not Bob is actually a company, but I can call and ask. Sometimes they haven't had a company for years.
The preferred methods today seems to be Facebook for your average builder, Instagram if they feel like they do more upscale work. I'm on neither platform, so I have to resort to taking pictures of vans when I'm out and about.
I think the problem is that having a website is a bit complicated for a carpenter, but not enough business for a webdesign company to deal with.
Couldn't agree more. Worth pointing out that sites owned by Meta and Twitter in particular have become much more hostile to signed out users - often impossible to view a business' listing without a signed in account. Walled gardens are going to wall, of course. But I'm not sure how much small business owners realise that a proportion of traffic / interest has much more difficulty in finding them.
The thing that gets me is how many side projects and indie products only exist on Twitter or a GitHub readme. Like you built something cool but I have to scroll through your tweet history to understand what it does? Even a single page with a clear description, maybe a screenshot, and a link to try it would go so far. I recently launched a Chrome extension and the number of people who told me they almost did not try it because there was not enough info upfront was a wake up call.
What's wrong with a README? It's as close to a website as one can get within a self-contained repository, and is most likely to be kept up to date with any given version of the project. If there is one document available anywhere that describes a project, I would hope it is the README.
Good idea, I did just such a thing myself, deleting all my socials and only posting my photos to my own website: https://dombarker.co.uk/
Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
Beautiful photos! And the site is very nice looking too .
Can I ask what you do wrt the photo storage for your site? I'm looking to get back into photography and don't use Instagram etc, so want somewhere to post. Wondering how I might set up my own site for this purpose. Thanks
thank you very much :)
I use google cloud buckets for the raw storage, and then Imagekit as a CDN / transform layer (to prevent direct access and to crop/resize etc).
the rest of if it is a nextjs app router jobby. All your regular LLM's will be able to generate one of these for you quite straightfowardly
1 reply →
I have done the same, but your website is really nice! And your photos are lovely. I like how you've indicated which cameras and gear you use for certain trips.
That 600mm Sony lens must be fun to carry around. I used to have a Tamron 150-600mm lens for my Nikon, but my wife said it looked ridiculous, so I got rid of it. So now I'm mostly on M43 for portability.
I dont think its too bad! I have it on a peak design strap and have it on my back diagonally. It probably does look ridiculous, but im sure them camo outfit is just as bad as the camera!
Yes the OM-System stuff is awesome, i think its the only thing that would tempt me away from Sony
the camera data is all in the EXIF so it was pretty easy to do. Good olde CRUD apps are a joy to build now!
Great photos. I love your Norfolk robins. I also love that you've taken the time to set up browsing by species!
If you're at all interested in feedback:
- When scrolling through a gallery grid, the multiple fixed-position headers eat up an awful lot of screen real estate. On my MacBook Air (effectively 1280x800), I can only see one full row of photos at a time. Feels very cramped.
- Navigating to a photo from a gallery and then hitting my browser's “Back” button takes me back to the “Report” tab on the galley, not the photo grid. Makes gallery browsing pretty difficult.
- Maybe both of these problems could be ameliorated by making gallery photos open in the lightbox, rather than shunting you directly to their pages. Although...
- Items in a gallery's slideshow/lightbox display don't have a link to their photo pages. Maybe the name of the photo could link to its page?
im very interested, thanks so much!
- gallery photos now open in lightbox
- gallery lightbox has view photo button
todo: make fixed header a bit shorter
2 replies →
I run something similar, ish: https://photos.rymc.io/
I still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
Speaking of open graph, your index doesn't have it when I bookmark using Raindrop.
1 reply →
Gorgeous photos. One point of feedback: I went to your shop to view prints, and while it was nice to see them "in situ", I couldn't see the actual images because of how they small they were in frame!
oh wow! thanks for checking at letting me know, i think you are the first vistior to a shop page in GA!
Great photos and I like how you show metadata, remind me of Flickr.
I think photography is one of the things that better to have website than use social media like Instagram. You can display your photos however you like and not to worry about platform limitations.
Edit: Do you use CMS?
no CMS, its a nextjs app using GCP for storage
Great photos! Thanks for sharing!
no worries, glad you liked them
Your photos are amazing!
you are very kind :)
Excellent photography
thank you!
In case anyone is wondering, the picture is from this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...
Thanks, I was actually wondering why that image looked oddly familiar and pretty sure I remember seeing that book way back in my elementary years.
To further add to this:
Government agency websites should host their own content on their own servers (why do so many cities use google drive sharing? my own even uses facebook links). No, I do not think I should have to participate in private companies' walledgardens... for basic citizen services/information.
This is as simple as (e.g.) in Chattanooga you cannot find out your trash/recycling schedule without using Google services. It shouldn't be necessary to whitelist private companies for government services.
Random pho restaurants (or whatever) are usually literal mom-and-pop shops and asking these people to put up (and maintain!) a website is usually too daunting for them. These are the places that tend to end up with only a facebook page or an insta.
It's just too hard for normies to DIY, and local "web dev firms" are usually predatory in their insistence on making decisions that require ongoing maintenance, because recurring revenue.
Just try to get your local web design firm to build you a static html-only site and hand you the creds for all the hosting, etc.
What random hair salons or coffee shops need is basically github pages with bring-your-own-domain, WYSIWG editing that works on mobile, and zero git. but AFAICT no such service exists.
You just described Wix and Squarespace.
I've admittedly never heard of wix, but I was under the impression squarespace was selling "e-commerce solutions" and stuff.
2 replies →
Really, it's 2026 and you don't think that there are website builders for small businesses? I'm sorry, but are you kidding me?
There are even restaurant focused website builders for small businesses...
One Google feature that I think is killing the internet is actually useful in this case - the AI summary. If your vital information is on a platform that I will never join, I can't see it directly. But Google can, and many times I can find what I need in the summary. Of course it's not perfect, like when I'm trying to find holiday hours.
What techies are missing is that AI doesn't make it possible for mom and pop shops to create and manage a website but it levels the playing field for enterprenuers. We can't expect plumbers and restaurant owners to spend 12+ hours fighting with AI website builders just to get a cookie cutter-website that is nothing more than a brochure. Nor can they fork thousands of dollars for web design agencies and spend months in mindless meetings. Thanks to AI now there is a way: small mom and pop local website builders can offer a white-gloves solution that scales and drives revenue for the SMBs.
They have already been doing that for 10-15 years via page builders and themes in Wordpress. It is easier now, but small players have had relatively decent tools for quite some time.
Exactly this. It was already very easy. Just choose a local hosting company, most of them have free ssl and one click installs for wordpress etc.
People are overthinking it.
Most people hired someone for handling WordPress. Rally, most people are overwhelmed with that complexity.
2 replies →
This is the kind of thing that feels obvious but apparently still needs to be said. I've seen businesses run entirely off an Instagram page, and when the algorithm changes or the account gets flagged, they lose everything overnight. No way to reach their customers, no archive of their work, nothing.
I wish this happened much more frequently actually so people would realize it's not a reliable platform to build a business on.
I mentor a couple folks that are either in college or just graduated.
They ask how to "get their name out there" in industries or domains where they either don't have a lot of experience or want to grow their career.
My first response is always: "Do you use social media? and do your socials point back to a blog or website showing your work?"
THEIR response is almost always "social media is toxic!"
To which I reply: "Some of social media is toxic. However, there are a LOT of smart folks online and the lifetime value of going from zero to even a single post about what you are into is enormous. This is especially true if what you put out there is niche and also highlights your value to the right people."
It's actually kind of sad that the needle against social media/websites has gone so far that the positives are being ignored by the younger generation.
Especially so as many people of my generation (Late Gen X/Early Millenials) have stories about how social media helped them get a job, make a great contact or join some group that benefited their life that they wouldn't have been a part of otherwise etc
Recently explained to a local service business owner that all she needed to do was get listed on Google maps and start asking customers for reviews. Literally showed her how competing businesses were top of the search results by doing just this.
Did she do it? No.
People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.
Totally agree. Websites are a must.
But websites are not everything. Everything would include updating the website with hours, menus, etc. And since way too many businesses in my part of the world (rural Virginia, though not sure that matters) can't update their hours, email, menus, etc. on socials, there is no way they can manage a website.
Lately, I've been trying to get restaurants, in particular, to share their news in text in addition to the graphic. They can't/won't do that. Why? Not sure and I don't care enough to ask. But I am not following them anymore and telling them why. Not sure they care, which is fine.
Yes, you should have a website if you have a business or you wish to maintain any public footprint on the internet.
But it is both simple and complicated to setup a website these days.
For a technical audience there are great tools/options to choose from. You can build a rock solid website serving tons of traffic using 3rd party hosting for cheap. But, there are lots of options and as a geek it's easy to get rabbit-holed in the process.
For non-technical users it's similar, many solutions that require minimal technical knowledge. But the technical knowledge is very leaky and most providers border on landlords seeking to extract their rent while holding users hostage.
I'm working on something small in a specific niche aimed at non-technical users. I worry a lot that I don't fully understand what keeps people from building their own site?
Every day on instagram I see people post pictures of text w/ words that are partially or fully obscured from view; presumably censoring themselves or others for the sake of the algorithm. Make a website, post what you like, be free.
Well fucking said. JavaScript was a fucking scourge upon the web as it convinced everybody that you need to know how to write an "app" to share text and jpegs, which we have been doing with the Document Object Model for literally decades.
Websites and HTML/CSS are documents. If you can write a Word document you can write a website. Death to walled gardens which have been the main locus of enshittification of the web.
If the CG-NAT problem can be solved one day I look forward to a rebirth of true P2P networking and information sharing with no central authority.
I agree.
I think modern overlay networks can navigate CG-NAT fine now. Other options include free cloudflare, or just a wireguard tunnel to a free tier VPS. On a similar point, I don't think enough people talk about how most western home internet connections now also have similar bandwidth as entire datacentres had in the 2000's too.
We still take for granted how hard basic web technology is for people who don't consider themselves technology people though.
I wonder if Microsoft FrontPage was still a thing HTML/CSS websites might be a little more common?
Those were the days...
Is there a way to view IG pages without logging in? I would love to delete the app and setup privacy redirect.
It depends. If there's a share id (?igsh=xxc) in the link usually no, but if you remove it usually yes. Opening more than a few posts/stories will result in a popup to sign in, but at least the core page and introduction should be visible.
Change the URL from instagram.com to imginn.com. There are browser extensions which will do it automatically.
Doesn't work..
Try switching to desktop mode
it still forces you to log in when you scroll and you can't view any post iirc. Maybe solvable with ublock filters or some console commands but I haven't bothered
1 reply →
My two cents: I'd love to have a site. I've been involved with web technologies since the early/mid 2000s, when I built my first site in elementary school.
I've picked up hobbies since then that lend themselves well to sharing online, but right now, with the amount of LLM-related scraping happening, I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.
These bots make their own ground rules -- "just put up this special robots.txt thing" -- and then ignore them, requiring tools like Anubis to be created, maintained, and kept constantly up to date, and for what? So the plagiarism machine can plagiarise more? Copyright courts have apparently just checked out on this, so I'm not at all confident they'll do anything about this.
To be clear: my ego isn't so huge that I want my name plastered everywhere, on everything I've ever touched. I believe strongly in the principle of not getting your shit scraped online and then churned out into something that these LLM companies can (eventually? presumably?) profit off of (or at least turn into investment, in the short-term). These companies have done terrible things to the state of public discourse and I do what I can to avoid feeding the beast.
> I have no intention at all of hosting anything I've made by hand, be it code, photos, recipes, etc.
Do you publish any such items on platforms you don't own (you specifically said you "have no intention of... hosting anything")?
I haven't in a very long time, over a decade at this point.
A few friends and I have a small handful of self-hosted services that we all run on a VPN between our places with stuff like a recipe sharing app, etc., but the number of people with access to that is single digits.
In terms of "hosting anything," I still have my own homelab, and my self-hosting will be limited to this sort of stuff for the foreseeable. A cluster of limited-scope apps that helps me and a handful of friends keep in touch after moving out of our hometown, beyond just chatting in Signal groups.
I won't be putting up my own public website (or portfolio, or whatever; be it hosted on my own infra or not).
A few comments point out, and I agree, that setting up, never mind maintaining a webpage, has become a PITA:
- server (AWS? 10 optional services to config etc etc, config, updates etc)
- domain
- SSL cert
Are there solid providers who do it all-in-one? I pay one bill, get a domain, SSL certificate, renewed, and a managed, pre-configured Linux box, or even static hosting? Thinking of setting up a webpage for my consulting business and I'd rather not spend weeks fiddling with all this, or (shudder) use Wix.
Literally type "webhosting" into a search engine and every single provider that comes up will do that all-in-one. They'll also throw in a database and PHP, probably with an automatic installer for things like WordPress. There's a good chance your registrar will even try to upsell you the whole package.
These things are not the hard part.
Backblaze offers 10 GB of free storage and CloudFlare offers free data transfer from B2, with these two you can host a static site for free. I have a worker script that routes requests to the index page and sets cache headers for my site.
You can do it a lot easier with GitHub pages, but no business owner is going to be able to do either of these.
You can use GitHub pages. Or just set up one virtual server and host everything on it - I do that and it's pretty painless. The "10 services on AWS" is definitely the most painful way there is.
Providers like Netlify, Firebase Hosting, CloudFlare are much better value for money for features for maintenance. Static hosting means you don't need to update the server because there isn't one, and there are even free tiers below a certain usage.
There's still the usability thing, they're not made for non-techies. There's an assumption you'll use Git, etc. But there's no practical reason why Netlify CMS or similar couldn't handle everything.
I have actually been experimenting with this. And it's real simple.
I think for these cases everyone should be shooting for a static site. In which case it is: 1. Rent a vps 2. Buy a domain 3. Set up nginx or something else 4. Copy files to the right folder 5. Point a dns record to said server 6. Use certbot to get an ssl cert installed for you
It's not that hard really.
It's not that hard for you... the process you just described is unintelligible for 99% of the population I would say. And then you have to produce the content on top of that.
1 reply →
Sorry, just confirming, this is sarcasm, right?
NearlyFreeSpeech might be what you want. Been using them for over a decade and still love them. They handle domains/DNS, hosting (static and other), mysql hosting, email forwarding, and much more. They also have great content policies, ie they only kick you off if you're breaking the law.
This has always been the case, not sure why you’d frame it as a recent development. Not that long ago you even had to PAY for an SSL cert. Domains are nothing new. You always needed a server.
It hasn't. TLS was not needed until recently. Non-TLS sites used to show up in search results. TLS was not mandatory at all. Also ISPs often provided users with a free webspace. So I could just send 1 html file to my host without much technical knowledge and I had a website that people could visit.
Static hosting is amazing for toooons of use-cases. Especially those where You Just Need A Website (business hours, contact info, general info).
Netcup, Hetzner, Strato, OVH, Ionos, ...
Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain name is like your home address in the physical world; not having one is like not being a citizen of civil society.
As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.
I have two fucking websites. One I live from.
These days, it's pretty demoralising to run a website. Google AI overviews and LLMs have reduced traffic by over 60%, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. These numbers are typical.
At the same time, the cost and difficulty has raised because of misbehaving AI crawlers and bots attacking every moving part. I'm glad I went with static sites and not WordPress.
So you need to work harder and harder for a dwindling audience, and the cost of keeping the lights on keeps going up.
I used to make websites for businesses, a bit over a decade ago. The job feels just as hard now as it was back then. One notable exception is caddy and automatic SSL.
Same here. Even before AI, Google reduced my traffic all the time in favor of showing my competitors content, because they simply have a much larger footprint in the web as they started 5 years earlier. If you think about this twice, it means that the web (refereed to as Google search) is getting much less diversified, because Google acts as a positive funnel for already larger sites.
Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be difficult to outrank them.
Yes but without your efforts, Google shareholders wouldn’t be able to profit off your content.
Well at least they asked nicely
For some things I get this. Restaurants? Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers? I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work. I could care less if they have a website because that’s just marketing for them. I source almost 100% of these types of workers via referral from friends/family.
> Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers?
Plumbers and electricians: Maybe not. But lots of other house repairs stuff: Yes.
Things I want to see:
Geographical coverage area: Some are across town and are not willing to come to my property. Others are.
Services rendered: There job title may be very generic, but it often turns out they do only certain types of work.
Minimum fees: Some only do jobs that cost, say, $1000 or more. If my work is small, I shouldn't bother calling them.
> I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work
I do so as well, but they rarely pick up the phone. You call them, leave a voicemail, and pray they'll call you back at a time you can pick up. About 50% of them never call back. So every time I need some repairs/work done on the house, I have to get 10 "leads", and call them, leave a voicemail, and a few days later repeat the process because they either didn't call back, or called and said they don't do that type of work.
If I can pre-filter those out based on basic stuff on their website, it'd be great.
I used to work in construction in a previous life and always said I could judge how good a tradesman is simply by their appearance. The same goes for their website. If they have pride in their work it will show; if they do just about enough to get paid it will also show.
Interesting. I'd personally rather them be great at what their job actually is and not waste time on a website. I think the best tradesmen don't need a website because their work (and their happy customers!) speaks for itself.
I want the website so I can look up their phone number and license.
I'm all for personal website and these sentiments which regularly come up here around self hosting. This one seems a bit disproportionately confused and angry though.
If we're going to have any large aggregation or social media businesses where individuals trade data ownership for convenience, being able to put your opening hours and rates on the the internet without having to figure out how to have a website seems like the optimal use case.
I think we should aim for a sensible mid ground where social media provides just the things it provided before around 2011, like updates and communication with people you know and want to interact with already.
An "all personal websites" web that OP is calling for is just pushing the exclusion they feel onto the people they're complaining about.
We should have websites. We should also use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job, and running your own website isn't the best tool if you just want to get your business rates and opening hours on the web.
> Set up a website
I dislike how this article handwaves its own recommendation away. The steps required to “have a fucking website” are so much more complex than they used to be. Mandatory† TLS is the biggest hurdle, because now there needs to be software running to renew your certs instead of just tossing some plain files up in a directory on an HTTP server that could run for years unattended. Gone are the days when it was easy for a website to outlive its author, and it's our fault!
† Yes, the fact that the world's most popular browser puts a big red NOT SECURE!!! warning next to any non-TLS website makes it mandatory regardless of the fact that plain HTTP still technically loads. Scareware works on people or they wouldn't do it.
Most deployment platforms will do this for you for free. You're talking about specifically unmanaged Wordpress hosting I think.
i don't see how that's more of a hurdle than running an always-accessible web server -- for the average normie (plus managing dns in the first place etcetc)
i think the implication is "just use a web host" and i agree
if i was helping someone set up a website i'd either set them up with a WYSIWYG website builder-hoster a la wix (i'd have to google around for a specific one to try though) or if i had faith enough, i'd set them up with a workflow publishing to cloudflare pages; both would handle the domain and ssl for them
if they want to take payments then idk lol
It is simply nuts how much people and businesses underestimate a good website.
If you're a small business of any kind, like a single person business, you can have tens of thousands of dollars in sales from just a good website and grow it to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years.
If you're an already established medium size business, you can boost your sales immensely, and reduce administration and customer support by 80%.
Yet, everybody is instead working their asses off to produce social media content and get more likes and followers, even though that doesn't translate well to real sales.
Businesses spend thousands to hire "influencers" and keep throwing in casino bets to Meta to "boost" their own posts. But paying for a good website is unthinkable, even in cases where there are guaranteed good returns.
Do you suggest small businesses send tattoos and freshly baked bread in the mail? I do not how they benefit from it
You should be able to book your tattoo session directly on their website, so that the tattoo artist doesn't have to interrupt his work to answer phone calls from people wanting to schedule.
I don’t understand why people think it’s so difficult to build a website. If you let go of the idea that every little site has to look ‘modern’ and have thousands of features, it’s really easy. Stallman’s website would be a good example. It’s super minimalist, and there’s nothing stopping a restaurant from building a site like that too. The homepage can simply list the opening hours and special offers, and then have a subpage listing the regular menu. All you need is HTML and a Server. If you don't want to rent one just buy a Raspberry Pi and host it at the restaurant or at home. Even if you don’t know much about technology, you can always ask a computer science student or a friend’s child to do it for a bit of pocket money.
I think you underestimate how what you just wrote will fly over the head of most non technical people?
Yeah. "put some HTML on a server" may as well say "split a few atoms" for people who have never done so.
No one is saying that it's impossible to learn all that stuff. But it takes time, has a fairly high entry barrier (despite LLMs and all that), and needs to happen _while_ keeping the business afloat.
Having a website like stallmans would be worse for a business than having no website
Or just host it on squarespace (or something similar).
Instead of focusing on why having a website is better for customers (100% it is), the article is really an attack on... developers at Meta and tech other companies? I love a good profanity laced rant, but the entire article reads unfocused and unpersuasive.
the entire article reads unfocused and unpersuasive.
Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
I disagree. It is not an attack on the developers, but the platforms‘ mechanics.
I agree, the reasons were skipped, except for business hours and rates. People really need a reason to spend countless hours on something digital.
Countless hours? Get someone to make you a webpage, they can use Wix or Shopify or something like this. It’s never been easier or cheaper. In the grand scheme of running a business, it’s one of the best effort:return ratios you can find.
2 replies →
Unnecessary vulgarity makes you look stupid.
I think you mean, "Unnecessary vulgarity makes you look fucking stupid."
"pedophilic fascist speed freaks" made me laugh, which made me happy
Except, this time it is necessary
Maybe I'm just surprised by and not accustomed to the amount of anger that has been normalized in many people.
+1 I can’t even delete my old stuff on HN. I don’t own my comments here. In contrast, I can go ahead and delete any of my Facebook posts or comments from 10 years ago. In a way, HN is more hostile than Facebook.
Do you think that by deleting facebook posts anything gets deleted on Facebook's servers?
It likely gets physically deleted after 3-5 years, whereas on HN I can neither delete nor archive a comment or post I made yesterday.
2 replies →
I'm sure I've read they support this if you email them. It's a manual action but if you're based in Europe they will have to do it by law.
> Europe they will have to do it by law.
Realistically, they can simply ignore it with no consequences.
2 replies →
x is arguable better than twitter ever was and most arguments are just political bias or elon hate. i feel like x is just as far-right and just as far-left as you make it now because the feed is tuned by engagement and followers, people who call it out or refuse to participate are just using emotionally politically charged points that are mostly untruthworthy because they are not objectionable. i find x to be the closest thing to a truly open platform now minus the expensive api costs and some other annoyances with premium etc(there are ways around it).
when you consider that they don't ban stuff only in rare cases of it being illegal content, articles are clean and easy and have real reach if you know what you are doing, no particular ideology is governing the platform other than if you just don't like elon and you refuse to participate. it's far better than it was prior and i have been a user of twitter/x since 2013. i really enjoy talking to the many people around the globe on x (mostly japanese which have a very rich X community).
that all being said, social media is a contagion for the masses, and i still run 3 sites regardless of having an x account(i deleted instagram,facebook, never used tiktok).
The aside about mailing lists is well made: with the exception of SMS, email is the one method of customer contact not mediated by big tech networks (save arguably Gmail) and portable across service providers. In games it’s the best way to keep in touch with players, much better than discord where the dots accumulate and most members ignore most server updates and notifs.
Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
And please, find an alternative to discord for your community.
It baffles me that everyone has collectively decided it's a great idea to have discussions on a platform which is not indexable, and has no usable search even when you're in it.
i have my own personal website which i customized to my own liking (catppuccin theme, walking pet, music player [with animations and iOS-like blur effects], etc.) and even added a tiny blog section, where i usually post, well, anything i'd post on traditional, centralized social media.
i made it so, if something is relevant enough (i.e. it is something i'm actually proud of, or is something with enough quality), it is posted on my site first, and just then reposted to other platforms. i even added a rss feed if anyone wanted.
and last but not least, i optimized it so it loads within less than 512kb (333kb as of writing this, i might add or remove more stuff in the future that might change the total size), and it is fully functional on devices as old as Android 6 (i don't have anything older to test, sorry about that).
I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!
Platforms have always been liabilities. First you trade privacy for convenience, and soon after, you trade ownership for reach, and ultimately you lose both.
Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.
You‘re absolutely right. (I‘m not an LLM ;-)) And the fact that (I‘m looking at you, LinkedIn!) platforms actively block people from using external links is a good warning sign.
Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.
Easier said than done, and completely ignoring the intricacies of "just have a website".
I can write the html, CSS, JavaScript needed for a website, I can spin up a local web server to serve these files, but setting up an internet facing website, no. No clue how to go about it, how to secure it, and how to maintain it.
Give me a step by step guide that is simple, and can ensure security and privacy, and I'll have a website. But until then I'll use what's convenient.
If you already have your HTML and CSS, just upload it to https://surge.sh/ or another one of the bajillions of static site hosting services.
As an engineer and self-hosting and self-coding enthusiast, I would agree with a lot of the points. I have spent most of my life in IT advocating for decentralization and democratization.
However, as someone who has had enough experience in the real world to notice how different time and skill constraints lead to different requirements for outsourcing, I think that it sounds elitist. Even an LLM is not sufficient for people who don't even know the difference between backend and frontend or what an API is, and therefore don't stand a chance to craft a proper prompt, let alone properly test the code that the LLM produces.
For context, I could also tell Mr. "Having a fucking website" that they're a hypocrite because they run a blog on Wordpress and have a social media account on mastodon.social. Those who really believe in decentralization run their own stuff, or code their own blogging platform like I did. They don't just brag of how morally superior they are just because they deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Of course I would sound elitist. And that's exactly how their stance sounds to the average bakery shop owner.
A takeaway thought: find orgs you use or know of and suggest they get a website if the don't have one or to improve it if they do (could even be a simple web dev biz)
Www.neocities.org is waiting. It’s a small fun site to practice with :)
Sure, right after DNS, hosting, SSL, and convincing Google I exist.
I don't understand this. There are super cheap shared-hosting plans the allow you to just do a couple clicks to install WordPress with full control. Then about $13/yr for a .com with no trouble with SSL or Google.
Plenty of free tier options like Cloudflare pages, etc too.
For the last bit - nothing wrong with the same Insta account with a link to your webpage. Agreed on the first bit.
On one hand, I totally agree, as I'm all for indie small web. Haven't used Facebook and Instagram for years. On the other hand, it's not (small) business owners deliberately choose to not have a website, it's customers saying it's too much friction for anything outside of FB or IG. For some people if you are not on IG you do not exist, no matter how nice your website is.
I don't think he's saying don't have social media and replace it with a website but also have a basic website in addition to what ever else your doing
Then it's twice the work. For a mom-and-pop restaurant, putting food on the table (pun intended) probably already cost them 24 hours a day.
I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses don't have websites:
It's not about it being hard to create and manage a website, it's that the vast majority of customers use social media platforms (as well as platforms like google maps) to find out about shops and F&B. For many businesses having an Instagram page will draw a lot more people than having a random website.
Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.
Summary: A rant by and entitled techie complaining about non-techies taking the path of least resistance which slightly inconveniences the author.
You may see this as a rant but it's in fact a very valuable recommendation that apparently people no longer take seriously.
The path of least resistance is not a good way to do business or provide good service to your customers.
So how do I do that? I can't host it easily on the machine in the office because NAT and dynamic IPs have trained us that this is not really possible (it is, buty you have to know what you're doing).
Pay a hosting provider, but who? Do I need to buy an SSL certificate, because we decided we need HTTPS everywhere for some reason? What about if my site gets DDOSed? Do I get charged more?
So I can use something free like Github Pages, but now I'm under a different tech overlord, no?
I can see why people just say screw it and go back to IG/FB. The web is too complicated now.
I think many people here are overthinking it. OP is mostly talking about simple business website not huge platforms to host. Ddos protection is kind of irrelvant for such small projects. But anyhow there are so many local hosting companies (europe) for at least the last 10 years that provide a free ssl cert, one-click options for wordpress etc. It’s really not that complicated.
Irrelevant nerd myopia. They mostly just paid someone to do it (until they decided "wordpress guy" was not worth the marketing budget). If anything DYI is easier than ever.
Most businesses do have a web site. Although for too many small businesses, it's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.
This matches exactly what I see building software for small merchants in the GCC. A coffee shop owner in Riyadh is working 14 hour days. The barrier isn't technical ability or even cost. It's that every solution requires context they don't have and time they don't have.
The products that work are the ones where the merchant never has to think about the technology at all. They just see customers coming back.
People just don’t get it.
The old internet isn’t coming back. Yea you could setup a little old school page but you won’t have visitors. So what’s the point? Better to post a blog post on instagram as pictures where you get more reach, instead of a website where no one really cares.
If running a little website meant you’d actually get an audience, people would do it. But it doesn’t happen, we can see the traffic stats. And so, there’s just better things to do with your time and life than maintain a website no one goes to. That’s just the reality. I’d argue your better off handwriting a little journal, at least then you get the pleasure of holding a physical object you filled with thoughts.
what you really need is a service that tunnels information from instagram and facebook businesses onto their display
although you can look at some of them without an account on those services today, and maybe, but maybe not tomorrow
so just need to boost the information people have posted, into something else
And while we're at it, make sure it works everywhere and is accessible. Luckily this is easy to do, just don't clutter it up with a bunch of nonsense frontend frameworks.
The point is to tell people about your business, not show off your design skills. If you have a blind client on a 30 year old computer, they should still be able to use your website to get information about your business.
Twitter has vastly improved the last couple of years, especially with Community Notes.
It's great in principle. However, in the past decade I've never visited even one single restaurant's website. I just check menus and phone numbers on google map. I trust google map photos (not saying they're 100% reliable) much more than a site owned by the restaurant's owner anyway.
And where does Google map get it’s information?
A lot of it comes from street view. They literally drive by and take pictures of your store.
Mostly uploaded from users.
In the past decade I haven't been to the dentist, but I'm not arguing to shut them all down.
When and where exactly did I suggest shut all restaurant websites down?
The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links.
The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.
A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.
[0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/ [1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/
He specifically says "if your are a business, an individual artist or creator". They aren't saying everyone, just people who have the potential to benefit from it. Not a blog site, basically they're advocating for personal portfolio sites and contact points. Having 5 social sites you might be contacted through is a pain that often means commission or work requests simply get missed.
You have a what website? A website that does what!?
Some argue the internet was made for that.
isn't maps.google.com or facebook.com also a website? The internet wasn't made for them?
1 reply →
Most people dont have anything interesting to share.
"If you're a hair salon, or a tattoo artist, or a restaurant, or whatever, please just have a fucking website where I can go and see your rates and hours."
It's true there are some businesses that only publish rates and hours on Facebook
But it's probably relatively small number
Given the choice between (a) a business that has a listing accessible via yellowpages.com, Google Maps, etc. and (b) one that has a social media account but no listing in any business directory, it stands to reason that there will be more opportunities to choose (a) than (b)
There are also other reasons to prefer (a) to (b) besides avoiding Facebook of course
Excessive swear words are really fucking edgy. It only defuses your argument by saying "Because I said so!"
The arguments in the article are good but start by telling you what to do. That doesn't work.
So edgy, is this person older than 14 years old? Who brags about deleting a Facebook account as if it's an accomplishment?
Also have a HTTP only website.
I thought it will be about
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
That is still a very good template for how a simple website should be written.
This is kinda why the (fucking) platforms that you hate exist.
Small business wants a presence on the internet for reasons.
Originally, small business would have to pay $$$ to engage an expert, who will assist them in creating a website, hosting it, keeping it secure, keeping it up to date, figuring out the SEO to make it findable, etc.
It's obvious given 3s of thought that this sucks for a non-technical small business owner and can be optimised, so someone creates a platform to enable non-technical small business owners to do most of this without the cost/hassle of dealing with experts and owning the website themselves. This gets you to somewhere like MySpace, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, even Blogger, etc. But of course, such offerings aren't stable - they change, fail, or enshittify over time.
Facebook also sees an opportunity, and businesses start creating their own Facebook pages. Easy, and maybe even great for a while; except you're even more locked into the platform, only people who use Facebook can engage with you, and then trends move on and Facebook is less popular with your customer base than it once was.
You also want more of a visual presence to show off your cupcakes, or whatever. So an Instagram page.
TL;DR: there's no perfect solution for non-techies with a business. You either have a fucking website with all of the cost, hassle, and friction that comes with that, or you choose one of platforms that simplifies this but comes with unpredictable downsides over time.
Well articulated!
Ring them up?
So true!!!
1
Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao
In MX and elsewhere lots of them are just mobile number through Whatsapp specifically. Like they have a phone number but it may be data-only.
well said. nothing more to be added here. have a fucking website. especially without dependency on third parties that if blocked it won't load - like fonts, cdns, captchas... and better jet, don't make it SPA if you don't have to. stick to basic html.
> The concept of congregating in walled gardens owned by pedophilic fascist speed freaks
Are we really calling everyone we don't like a pedophilic fascist now? I honestly had really hoped that this sort of polarized, low-quality content wouldn't make it onto HN. :(
I thought it was pretty factual.
So which walled garden owner regularly has sex with prepubescent children and is a heavy meth user?
If you think that everyone who works on a website that is a walled garden is a "pedophile fascist", I don't know what to say to you -- I don't think we live in the same reality.
8 replies →
And start a fucking webring!
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Maybe turn off this dumb bot since it’s against the rules?
the sudden left turn into political bullshit really left a sour taste
and it's mostly just the same walled garden rant we've all heard and even made a variant ourselves
is this the type of content we have devolved into on here? I'd take endless ai slop over endless random cringe political posturing any day
If you prefer ai slop, let me introduce you to moltbook! Some of the ai agents there were even trained by humans being paid by pedophilic fascist speed freaks, so they tend to be more amenable to that sort of thing than your typical human.
>pedophilic fascist speed freaks
the LLMs have a wider vocabulary, argument range and worldview nuance than whatever the dogma of the month or whatever the fuck this is
Agree but most small biz don't conceive or care about the internet this way
What makes you say that? It’s rare that a store I’m going to, even local only, doesn’t have a website.
It's very common, almost 1 in 3, to _not_ have a website or online presence (~10mm+ small businesses have no online presence or site) in 2025.
3 replies →
I guess it depends on the type of business on your geography.
It is not RARE.
I got voted down for this? "Why are you booing me, I'm right"