alt Hacker NewsHave a fucking website
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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.
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.
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.
In case anyone is wondering, the picture is from this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...
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.
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.
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.
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.
good read. thanks for sharing
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Www.neocities.org is waiting. It’s a small fun site to practice with :)
Most businesses do have a web site. Although for too many small businesses, it's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.
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.
Sure, right after DNS, hosting, SSL, and convincing Google I exist.
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.
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.
You have a what website? A website that does what!?
Well articulated!
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 thought it will be about
1
> 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. :(
Lots of businesses never get beyond a mobile number lmao
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.
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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
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.