Have a Fucking Website

blinkbat

Agree but most small biz don't conceive or care about the internet this way

protocolture

Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao

ghayes

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.

rdevilla

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.

stackghost

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.

Arainach

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.

vivid242

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.

asukachikaru

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.

zjp

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.

qwertytyyuu

You have a what website? A website that does what !?

capncleaver

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.

Jeffrin-dev

The sentiment is right but I think it misdiagnoses why small businesses don't have websites. It's not laziness or ignorance. A solo tattoo artist working 50-hour weeks doesn't have 4 hours to debug why their Squarespace contact form stopped working, chase down a DNS issue, or figure out why Google isn't indexing them. Instagram just works, and their customers are already there. That's a rational choice, not a failure of character. The real problem is that we never built infrastructure for this. Email has SMTP. Phone numbers have number portability. But there's no equivalent for social followings — no standard that lets you pack up your audience and move it somewhere else. That's by design, obviously, but yelling at the tattoo artist for not having a website doesn't fix it. The mailing list advice is genuinely the best practical suggestion here though. Low friction, you own it, works across every platform shift for the last 30 years. If there's one thing worth pushing people toward, it's that — not the website itself.