> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's great to have a website. But in the past decade I've never visited even one single restaurant's website. I just check menus and phone numbers on google map.
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.
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 chocolate chip cookie a bitch, and then…? You weren’t having fun with your sister in law after that?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.
Just like the government finances roads, etc.
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.
Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
- 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.
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.
Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
I still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
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.
People here are overthinking it.
Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
Realistically, they can simply ignore it with no consequences.
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
Connection with people- this is what I want from the internet, too.
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.
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.
Those were the days...
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. :(
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.
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.