> 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.
The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
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.
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.
Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10 times the menu is either outdated or not properly structured and having a link to the menu website is better. So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still appreciate a website.
I can’t help but think what this means is just that the menu isn’t that’s important as a marketing tool. If having an up to date website and menu resulted in a noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have it.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!
Or it’s good for customers and bad for restaurants. There are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics, and you can avoid most of them just looking on their menu.
I think the parent is making the assumption that a business owner would be able (and willing) to update the menu on their own website, whereas random pictures on Google Maps/Instagram might not have the most recent menu.
Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.
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.
It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you serve.
Not really. I don't have an IG account, but when picking a place ein an area I don't know, it is the place to get an impression of the place. The visual part tells a lot about the place, while many websites maybe got a photo from the outside, if at all.
To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.
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.
Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.
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?
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.
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)
Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things.
Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.
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?
We should be making sure everyone has internet access, but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so no I don't think free internet access should come before that.
Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...
> 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?
Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.
Forgive me for assuming that the government owned service would be more transparent/serve the people better than a privately owned, closed source, platform that's explicitly funded by ads and so is transparently corrupt. Even your worst case scenario for this would be equivalent to what we already have.
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.
I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10 years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything more than that.
My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.
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.
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.
What is the tradeoff in the scenario you described? You were enjoying time with your sister in law, you called a cookie a bitch, and then…? You weren’t having fun with your sister in law after that?
I think the cost of having to say something humiliating is at least equal to the cost of the cookie, so I want it for free. Of course I had fun with my sister in law, even if I rolled my eyes at the business. That's beside the point. Making you say this stuff is a tiny, petty act of domination. Say it or you don't get the cookie, or you look unfun. Anyway, it's the same argument people have been having forever about not wanting to say 'grande' at Starbucks. A war we won. And we will win this one.
What makes it humiliating? To me, it's just words, a little childish but still.
I'm a Brit though, and I feel we have a much more lax attitude to swearing over here.
Do your friends and family know that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating to you? That’s a pretty strong feeling, so I would be pretty mad if I communicated that and people close to me still dragged me to those places anyway. I wouldn’t be mad at the business, though, I’d be mad at the people that are knowingly disrespecting my boundaries.
Are you concern trolling? Just copy our thread into Claude and have it explain it to you. In fact, here it is, pre-chewed and ready for your mama bird to throw it up into your mouth: https://claude.ai/share/9b5e6528-4358-458d-a6ca-cfe495ee6cfa
I don’t think that I’m going to read a Claude summary of this very short conversation that I’m currently having, but if you asked a chat bot to write some text about how the act of calling a cookie a bitch is a humiliating display of subjugation, I am sure that it did that.
Anyway I’ll just say that if you haven’t explained to your friends and family that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating for you, you should do that. If you have done that, you should do it again. Hoping that all of the Eggsluts and Hooters etc. go out of business is a terrible strategy, especially in the latter case because in that scenario all of those places could close tomorrow and you’d still be surrounded by people that will find one way or another to make you call a cookie a bitch.
I think you should and it would be productive for you, because you could learn from Claude’s
A) literacy, and
B) social awareness.
Both of which are, terrifyingly, greater than yours. I'm not going to be therapized by someone so obtuse that they read a deep fracture in my personal relationships out of a minor cultural complaint and some exaggerated rhetoric about the phenomenology of experiencing it when a machine that may not even have qualia gets the point.
Sorry I touched a nerve. For a less personal response to your sharing about being humiliated and dominated at Hot Cookie: you can just order chocolate chip there. I’ve been there, it’s a busy bakery and they do not have a policy of wasting time forcing customers to say swear words before accepting their money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 'own your own content' no longer have as much force.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
It is not "factual" to call these people pedophiles. Maybe you think they are bad for society. Maybe you think their websites are terrible. Maybe you don't like them. Those are all fine things, and you are free to say them! But to say they are factually a pedophile without evidence is not true. It only diminishes the quality of conversation.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
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 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.
And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.
If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
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.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.
> "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.
A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.
Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.
Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.
Just like the government finances roads, etc.
Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.
Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.
Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.
Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.
But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"
People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.
My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.
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.
Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
Anyway I’ll just say that if you haven’t explained to your friends and family that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating for you, you should do that. If you have done that, you should do it again. Hoping that all of the Eggsluts and Hooters etc. go out of business is a terrible strategy, especially in the latter case because in that scenario all of those places could close tomorrow and you’d still be surrounded by people that will find one way or another to make you call a cookie a bitch.
A) literacy, and B) social awareness.
Both of which are, terrifyingly, greater than yours. I'm not going to be therapized by someone so obtuse that they read a deep fracture in my personal relationships out of a minor cultural complaint and some exaggerated rhetoric about the phenomenology of experiencing it when a machine that may not even have qualia gets the point.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...
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.
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.
- 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.
These things are not the hard part.
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.
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.
Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
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.
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.
Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
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.
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 still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
People are overthinking it.
Realistically, they can simply ignore it with no consequences.
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.
Those were the days...
Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
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 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
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.
Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.
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.
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.
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.
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
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. :(
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
the LLMs have a wider vocabulary, argument range and worldview nuance than whatever the dogma of the month or whatever the fuck this is