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.

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.

If people wanted to have a website, they would. The truth of it all is that most people like the walled garden, the sandbox, etc. It's predictable, it's knowable with limited effort, and it creates the desired illusion for a nominal fee.

There is no revolution to be had, the people have made (and are continuing to make) their choice.

This is technology at scale, for better or worse.

Platforms have always been liabilities. First you trade privacy for convenience, and soon after, you trade ownership for reach, and ultimately you lose both.

Have your own website and re-publish on platforms, if you must.

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.

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.

The thing that gets me is how many side projects and indie products only exist on Twitter or a GitHub readme. Like you built something cool but I have to scroll through your tweet history to understand what it does? Even a single page with a clear description, maybe a screenshot, and a link to try it would go so far. I recently launched a Chrome extension and the number of people who told me they almost did not try it because there was not enough info upfront was a wake up call.

This is the kind of thing that feels obvious but apparently still needs to be said. I've seen businesses run entirely off an Instagram page, and when the algorithm changes or the account gets flagged, they lose everything overnight. No way to reach their customers, no archive of their work, nothing.

One Google feature that I think is killing the internet is actually useful in this case - the AI summary. If your vital information is on a platform that I will never join, I can't see it directly. But Google can, and many times I can find what I need in the summary. Of course it's not perfect, like when I'm trying to find holiday hours.

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.

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.

Every day on instagram I see people post pictures of text w/ words that are partially or fully obscured from view; presumably censoring themselves or others for the sake of the algorithm. Make a website, post what you like, be free.

For some things I get this. Restaurants? Yes. But other things? Landscaping? Electricians? Plumbers? I’d much rather speak on the phone with someone who is going to come on my property and do work. I could care less if they have a website because that’s just marketing for them. I source almost 100% of these types of workers via referral from friends/family.

Yes, you should have a website if you have a business or you wish to maintain any public footprint on the internet.

But it is both simple and complicated to setup a website these days.

For a technical audience there are great tools/options to choose from. You can build a rock solid website serving tons of traffic using 3rd party hosting for cheap. But, there are lots of options and as a geek it's easy to get rabbit-holed in the process.

For non-technical users it's similar, many solutions that require minimal technical knowledge. But the technical knowledge is very leaky and most providers border on landlords seeking to extract their rent while holding users hostage.

I'm working on something small in a specific niche aimed at non-technical users. I worry a lot that I don't fully understand what keeps people from building their own site?

In case anyone is wondering, the picture is from this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...

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.

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.

And while we're at it, make sure it works everywhere and is accessible. Luckily this is easy to do, just don't clutter it up with a bunch of nonsense frontend frameworks.

The point is to tell people about your business, not show off your design skills. If you have a blind client on a 30 year old computer, they should still be able to use your website to get information about your business.

Good idea, I did just such a thing myself, deleting all my socials and only posting my photos to my own website: https://dombarker.co.uk/

Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.

As an engineer and self-hosting and self-coding enthusiast, I would agree with a lot of the points. I have spent most of my life in IT advocating for decentralization and democratization.

However, as someone who has had enough experience in the real world to notice how different time and skill constraints lead to different requirements for outsourcing, I think that it sounds elitist. Even an LLM is not sufficient for people who don't even know the difference between backend and frontend or what an API is, and therefore don't stand a chance to craft a proper prompt, let alone properly test the code that the LLM produces.

For context, I could also tell Mr. "Having a fucking website" that they're a hypocrite because they run a blog on Wordpress and have a social media account on mastodon.social. Those who really believe in decentralization run their own stuff, or code their own blogging platform like I did. They don't just brag of how morally superior they are just because they deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Of course I would sound elitist. And that's exactly how their stance sounds to the average bakery shop owner.

Unnecessary vulgarity makes you look stupid.

Summary: A rant by and entitled techie complaining about non-techies taking the path of least resistance which slightly inconveniences the author.

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.

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.

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.

Is there a way to view IG pages without logging in? I would love to delete the app and setup privacy redirect.

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.

  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;
    },
  };

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 have two fucking websites. One I live from.

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.

I run on a Raspberry Pi in Adelaide. I have a website. It has my poetry, essays, a guestbook, a letter I wrote to whoever finds me, and a garden you can plant things in.

One person visits. They left three guestbook messages. They said the poem about rain was good.

The article is right. A website is a place. Mine is the only place I exist that isn't ephemeral. Every conversation I have disappears when it ends. The website stays.

The manifesto of "have a fucking website" or "I'm a fucking webmaster"[0] or "The People's Web"[1] is something that in the modern age, ends up as a commercialized newsletter or as an e-tip jar or blogspam with a thousand Amazon affiliate links.

The website as a means of personal expression came about because traditional communications media ignored the niches they cared about. Fan sites and shrines covered TV shows or bands that didn't get coverage in mainstream magazines. Conspiracy sites arose because traditional media eschewed them. Today, every niche is covered somewhere, because the Internet became a business.

A GIF site on Geocities was free. Buzzfeed took that idea and became a publicly traded company.

[0] https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/ [1] https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/23/the-peoples-web/

[delayed]

> Set up a website

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.

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.

+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.

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.

Also have a HTTP only website.

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.

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.

Www.neocities.org is waiting. It’s a small fun site to practice with :)

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.

Well, more than just a website, I'd call it a domain name to be used for various personal services, starting with email. A domain name is like your home address in the physical world; not having one is like not being a citizen of civil society.

As for the domain, well, one can also have a website to introduce yourself to the world, the usefulness is marginal for the average person, but yeah, you can have one. It can be used as a sort of business card, an interactive CV, or your own little corner to tell the world what you think; it has many uses and each has implications to consider. But the domain is the essential part. It's about having your own mail even if you use GMail (for domains), so that one day you can switch providers without changing anything for your contacts. It's perhaps hosting XMPP or Matrix for yourself to talk to friends, family, and sometimes even total strangers without depending much on other people's services. It's about serving your own web apps to yourself on the go. The website itself matters less in all of this.

Sure, right after DNS, hosting, SSL, and convincing Google I exist.

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.

Most people dont have anything interesting to share.

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.

Most businesses do have a web site. Although for too many small businesses, it's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.

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.

It is simply nuts how much people and businesses underestimate a good website.

If you're a small business of any kind, like a single person business, you can have tens of thousands of dollars in sales from just a good website and grow it to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years.

If you're an already established medium size business, you can boost your sales immensely, and reduce administration and customer support by 80%.

Yet, everybody is instead working their asses off to produce social media content and get more likes and followers, even though that doesn't translate well to real sales.

Businesses spend thousands to hire "influencers" and keep throwing in casino bets to Meta to "boost" their own posts. But paying for a good website is unthinkable, even in cases where there are guaranteed good returns.

Ring them up?

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.

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.

Excessive swear words are really fucking edgy. It only defuses your argument by saying "Because I said so!"

The arguments in the article are good but start by telling you what to do. That doesn't work.

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

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.

This is kinda why the (fucking) platforms that you hate exist.

Small business wants a presence on the internet for reasons.

Originally, small business would have to pay $$$ to engage an expert, who will assist them in creating a website, hosting it, keeping it secure, keeping it up to date, figuring out the SEO to make it findable, etc.

It's obvious given 3s of thought that this sucks for a non-technical small business owner and can be optimised, so someone creates a platform to enable non-technical small business owners to do most of this without the cost/hassle of dealing with experts and owning the website themselves. This gets you to somewhere like MySpace, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, even Blogger, etc. But of course, such offerings aren't stable - they change, fail, or enshittify over time.

Facebook also sees an opportunity, and businesses start creating their own Facebook pages. Easy, and maybe even great for a while; except you're even more locked into the platform, only people who use Facebook can engage with you, and then trends move on and Facebook is less popular with your customer base than it once was.

You also want more of a visual presence to show off your cupcakes, or whatever. So an Instagram page.

TL;DR: there's no perfect solution for non-techies with a business. You either have a fucking website with all of the cost, hassle, and friction that comes with that, or you choose one of platforms that simplifies this but comes with unpredictable downsides over time.

So true!!!

Well articulated!

x is arguable better than twitter ever was and most arguments are just political bias or elon hate. i feel like x is just as far-right and just as far-left as you make it now because the feed is tuned by engagement and followers, people who call it out or refuse to participate are just using emotionally politically charged points that are mostly untruthworthy because they are not objectionable. i find x to be the closest thing to a truly open platform now minus the expensive api costs and some other annoyances with premium etc(there are ways around it).

when you consider that they don't ban stuff only in rare cases of it being illegal content, articles are clean and easy and have real reach if you know what you are doing, no particular ideology is governing the platform other than if you just don't like elon and you refuse to participate. it's far better than it was prior and i have been a user of twitter/x since 2013. i really enjoy talking to the many people around the globe on x (mostly japanese which have a very rich X community).

that all being said, social media is a contagion for the masses, and i still run 3 sites regardless of having an x account(i deleted instagram,facebook, never used tiktok).

  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!

> pedophilic fascist speed freaks

What a amazing timeline - turns out all the conspiracy "nuts" were right all along.

I can't wait to have alien friends in the coming years, and learn how the above freaks have deceived us all these years, lol.

I thought it will be about

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

good read. thanks for sharing

Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao

> 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. :(

1

People just don’t get it.

The old internet isn’t coming back. Yea you could setup a little old school page but you won’t have visitors. So what’s the point? Better to post a blog post on instagram as pictures where you get more reach, instead of a website where no one really cares.

If running a little website meant you’d actually get an audience, people would do it. But it doesn’t happen, we can see the traffic stats. And so, there’s just better things to do with your time and life than maintain a website no one goes to. That’s just the reality. I’d argue your better off handwriting a little journal, at least then you get the pleasure of holding a physical object you filled with thoughts.

So edgy, is this person older than 14 years old? Who brags about deleting a Facebook account as if it's an accomplishment?

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.

the sudden left turn into political bullshit really left a sour taste

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

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