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Comment by Wowfunhappy

11 hours ago

Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.

26 comments

Wowfunhappy

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jonathanlydall  2 hours ago

Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription.

The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub.

Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years, a few extra days was nothing.

She did short sessions in spare time between other things, the wait between was maybe a little frustrating, but also gave the benefit that she would have had better clarity develop between sessions.

Website is not key to her business where it’s mostly word of mouth at this point (she’s been practicing for >20 years). Goals of website were:

- Findable in Google by “psychologist/therapist <area name>” (she also has a Google. Business profile so is findable on Google Maps).

- Minimal copy. A comforting sentence or two to state philosophy, qualifications, therapy types offered, where located, how to contact.

- Doesn’t feel dated.

Essentially it’s meant to complement the word of mouth aspect and maybe bring in the occasional completely new patient.

kakacik  14 minutes ago

There is an ocean sized gap for free stuff and something costing something, anything (not that this had to be the case).

Person not understanding this should not work in marketing, or even claim they understand human psychology.

georgemcbay  6 hours ago

> I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20

If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.)

I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription dark patterns over the past couple of decades.

These days just the packaging of anything into a subscription makes me assume there is intent to screw people out of money.

While signing up for LLM usage is fairly low risk as far as subscription lock-in goes, someone non-technical might not be aware of that fact.

  • jonathanlydall  2 hours ago

    See my more detailed sibling comment, but was more that the scope and urgency were so small that it wasn’t worth the hassle to set up the subscription and have to cancel it after.

thaumasiotes  11 hours ago

Does updating the website bring in additional money?

  • Wowfunhappy  11 hours ago

    Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?

    • jonathanlydall  2 hours ago

      She had no shortage of patients from word of mouth, but old website was minor liability in its datedness potentially putting off prospective patients.

      People already knew about her and website is essentially just “this is what I do, where I am and how you can contact me”.

      2 replies →

    • ElProlactin  10 hours ago

      > Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers.

      It depends what "nicer" means. Paying a web designer/developer to create a bespoke website doesn't guarantee that said website will have a better UI/UX and, most importantly, "convert" at a higher rate. Not every web designer/developer understands IA, content, performance optimization, etc.

      The popular AI tools produce websites that are clearly AI-produced if you know the patterns, but that doesn't mean they can't be usable and quite effective at converting. And if you have a bit of skill with prompting, AI can be really good at working through performance bottlenecks, etc.