Your website is not for you

adampunk

Counterpoint: yes it is.

arlobish

I get why a design studio would think this way, but in many cases it is for me.

juddlyon

Beware of the HIPPO! (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)

hyperhello

This writing was effective, clear, to the point, and revealed a human perspective. I can sense the frustrated professional going behind the curtain and tidying up his reservations about dealing with his clients. It was refreshing to read in exactly the way AI slop isn’t.

big85

Perhaps better stated: Your company's website isn't for you, it's to pursue the agenda of your company. Your personal homepage is for you, if you can free yourself from view count as a success metric.

embedding-shape

> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It should though, if people only got involved in stuff they're directly using themselves, all software would end up so much better. The best software out there seems to be when people who feel responsible over something, also uses that same thing themselves and they earn a comfortable living by doing so. If we could find a way of increasing the amount of software produced in this way, we could maybe avoid falling over spaghetti in some decades, otherwise we'll just live with 50% broken software which seems to be the current direction. Edit: I probably should have read the landing page first, which says: > Partner for designers - Websmith Studio builds future-ready websites in collaboration with world-class designers. They're clearly building client websites for others, then yeah, what they say is true, you're not building for yourself :)

brynet

oh, okay then.. you can have it https://brynet.ca/

jdw64

A website is a compromise between three parties. User: I want to get the information I came for. Business: I want to build brand trust and drive conversion. Internal organization: I want the owner’s taste and preferences to be reflected. The article strongly says that a website is for the user. I agree with the spirit of that argument, but in practice, most users’ “taste” is shaped by brand reputation. And where does brand reputation come from? Often, it comes from the owner’s taste, positioning, and accumulated decisions. A SaaS landing page is not only a place where users get information. From the company’s perspective, it is also a tool for imprinting the company’s positioning in the user’s mind. I think this phenomenon is essentially a principal-agent problem. In real client work, most clients are not thinking about UX. They are thinking about the owner’s experience — OX, so to speak. And in practice, most companies operate based on OX. In the ideal story, everyone says they care about UX. But most businesses do not actually run on UX. They run on OX. The key question is whether the owner’s taste happens to align with the public’s taste.

susam

When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise. Then I realised that the article talks about business websites, not personal websites. Quoting from the article: > The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content. Yes, I agree. While not really a business, I've always liked https://nhs.uk/ for its simplicity. I especially like the A-Z section where we can find details about a large number of medical conditions. Among actual businesses (small ones particularly) I like https://buttondown.com/ and https://kagi.com/ quite a bit. That said (and this is off-topic for this article), the part of the web I enjoy most is where your website is indeed for you , the small web of personal websites. That part of the web was an important part of me growing up from my late teens into adulthood and it remains the part I enjoy most even now. I want this part of the web to remain healthy and vibrant for as long as possible.

BoredPositron

Your commercial website is not for you. Would be a better title.

forgotusername6

This applies to pretty much every situation. It is not just about visual things, it is more about things that are easy to have an opinion on. Its similar concept to bike shedding, but with the added emphasis of the decision maker. Though the very fact we even call them that kind of implies that they should have a say right? I guess we object to the kind of say that they have. Should a decision maker just make binary decisions? Yes to this, no to that.

aleda145

I have felt this a lot when designing the landing page for my SQL canvas side project. _I_ really want to write about DuckDB WASM, pre-signed URLs and how cool Cloudflare's durable objects are. But my target audience are data analysts, and they just want to analyze some data! I have gone through a lot of design revisions because I have a hard time containing my technical excitement. I was surprised how hard communicating a product clearly is. As a backend/data person I was on the high horse thinking that designers jobs are so much easier than distributed systems. Now I feel the opposite!

coder97

"Can I get the icon in cornflower blue."

maxehmookau

This is a distillation of what we used to (still do?) teach junior SWEs. "You are not the customer for the thing we're making, nor have you ever been. You don't know what they want/need."

FlamingMoe

“A website isn't art. It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.” Eh, I don’t think this is accurate. A website does serve utility, but if you remove art from the discussion, then it becomes soulless, which is not the world we want to live in. Take HN for example. The first time I visited, I thought it was a terrible, dated design. But over time I grew to appreciate it. I think it is, in fact, quite artistic; it has a style, it makes a statement. If HN were “modern and user-first” maybe users would have an initial better impression, maybe they would even “convert” better initially. But long-term, it would start to lose its soul.

dmje

This is a job for people like me: product / project managers who work on a project to translate business (and audience!) needs into specifics around design and build. It's a skill all of its own, and it requires time and effort and expertise - it won't just emerge naturally, it won't happen without time thinking about strategy, audience, metrics, goals. We spend a whole bunch of time when we're running projects pushing back and telling clients to "think less like you and more like your audience". It's not surprising to me that clients come with pre-set notions: of course they do, it's their business, they're in it all day every day, and they're thinking about it all the time. This doesn't make them good at thinking about this stuff from alternative / audience angles!

pvillano

If you're in this comment section, consider play-testing your website. Find someone who has never used it and watch them explore it for the first time, while they think out loud, without giving them any help. My personal website had links to GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. on the home page, and the first thing my brother in law did was leave the site, without ever looking at any of my posts, which were indexed on another page. This example might be obvious to you, but I guarantee there's something you can learn through play-testing.

xyzelement

The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founders actually more correct.

Nivge

The problem is that user research and competitive research are also not the truth. I prefer to ship something I know I like than what someone else thinks a third abstract person might like.

celltalk

Yes, it’s for agents traversing the web universe like photons.