Someone wrote and deleted a comment saying<p>> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?<p>This is an all too common thought process among technologists, so:<p>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.<p>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:<p>* Most people don't know what they want<p>* Most people don't know the <i>words</i> for what they want<p>* 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.<p>* 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?<p>* Do you want people to be able to buy things? Now you're taking payment methods and have security concerns.<p>* 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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.<p>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.<p>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.
For many local places here, the only way to get the menu online is if a customer posted a photo of the menu on Google maps or something.<p>And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.
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.<p>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.
What makes you think that the menu in the website is not going to be outdated.
Really the previous comment should have mentioned Yelp, and perhaps Tripadvisor for non-American customers.
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.
IG is only for the regular customers.
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.
Most people should put in a Google maps entry
The issue is priorities.<p>If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?
I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?
Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.
<i>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><p>It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:<p>"Can you tell me if the food is good?"<p>"Can you tell me are the staff great?"<p>"Can you tell me what does it cost?"<p>and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.<p>People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.<p>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 <i>majority</i> 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.<p>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.
> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.<p>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.
No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.
> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"<p>> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"<p>> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"<p>> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.<p>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.
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?
Neocities is picking up the slack: <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a>
You may like this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772</a>
Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?
Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.
Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.
Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.
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.
Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.
Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)
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.<p>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?
Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree.<p>Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure.<p>Just like the government finances roads, etc.
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?<p>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.
And security
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.<p>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.
Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is too much.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Relying solely on Facebook or Instagram feels a bit to me like having an @aol.com email address back in the day.<p>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.
"Millenniales delendi sunt." Now, write it out a hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise...
You will be forced to watch Firefly for eternity. Millenials will rule the internet for a 1000 years (a millenia).
> I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger.<p>Seems odd to complain about the kitschy menu item names after walking into BURGERSLUT intent on ordering
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.
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/dp/0439148243" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Internet-First-Discovery-Book-Books/d...</a>
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.<p>Did she do it? No.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>An "all personal websites" web that OP is calling for is just pushing the exclusion they feel onto the people they're complaining about.<p>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.
your (or anyone's) pre-training data isn't really useful so don't worry, people overestimate the utility of unstructured data
The same could be said about posting anything publicly though, including our comments.
I have the same feeling paying for LLMs, it sucks we are financing genocide tools used by guys who are blackmailed with Epstein movies.
Is there a way to view IG pages without logging in? I would love to delete the app and setup privacy redirect.
Change the URL from instagram.com to imginn.com. There are browser extensions which will do it automatically.
Try switching to desktop mode
It depends. If there's a share id (?igsh=xxc) in the link usually no, but if you remove it <i>usually</i> 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:<p>- server (AWS? 10 optional services to config etc etc, config, updates etc)<p>- domain<p>- SSL cert<p>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.<p>These things are not the hard part.
Static hosting is amazing for toooons of use-cases. Especially those where You Just Need A Website (business hours, contact info, general info).
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.<p><pre><code> 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;
},
};</code></pre>
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.<p>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<p>It's not that hard really.
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.
Sorry, just confirming, this is sarcasm, right?
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.
Netcup, Hetzner, Strato, OVH, Ionos, ...
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.<p>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.
<i>the entire article reads unfocused and unpersuasive.</i><p>Nice, a human wrote it! Thanks for the recommendation!
I disagree. It is not an attack on the developers, but the platforms‘ mechanics.
I agree, the reasons were skipped, except for business hours and rates. People really need a reason to spend countless hours on something digital.
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.
I have two fucking websites. One I live from.<p>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 <i>typical</i>.<p>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.<p>So you need to work harder and harder for a dwindling audience, and the cost of keeping the lights on keeps going up.<p>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.
Yes but without your efforts, Google shareholders wouldn’t be able to profit off your content.
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.
Good idea, I did just such a thing myself, deleting all my socials and only posting my photos to my own website: <a href="https://dombarker.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://dombarker.co.uk/</a><p>Was fun to make 'just a website' for a change too.
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.<p>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 .<p>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!
I run something similar, ish: <a href="https://photos.rymc.io/" rel="nofollow">https://photos.rymc.io/</a><p>I still have an account or two elsewhere, but all photos get posted here then linked there with decent open graph previews.
Great photos! Thanks for sharing!
Your photos are amazing!
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 agree.<p>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.<p>We still take for granted how hard basic web technology is for people who don't consider themselves technology people though.
I wonder if Microsoft FrontPage was still a thing HTML/CSS websites might be a little more common?<p>Those were the days...
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.<p>Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.
So true!!!
> Set up a website<p>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 <i>our fault</i>!<p>† <i>Yes</i>, 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.
Most deployment platforms will do this for you for free. You're talking about specifically unmanaged Wordpress hosting I think.
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)<p>i think the implication is "just use a web host" and i agree<p>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<p>if they want to take payments then idk lol
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 :)
Most businesses <i>do</i> have a web site. Although for too many small businesses, it's generated by Place or Instacart or somebody.
Sure, right after DNS, hosting, SSL, and convincing Google I exist.
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.
For the last bit - nothing wrong with the same Insta account with a link to your webpage. Agreed on the first bit.
Easier said than done, and completely ignoring the intricacies of "just have a website".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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?<p>So I can use something free like Github Pages, but now I'm under a different tech overlord, no?<p>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.
And where does Google map get it’s information?
In the past decade I haven't been to the dentist, but I'm not arguing to shut them all down.
good read. thanks for sharing
I think most comments miss the point on why many small businesses don't have websites:<p>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 <i>what</i> website? A website that does <i>what</i>!?
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.<p>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.<p>Just <i>try</i> 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.<p>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.
You just described Wix and Squarespace.
Really, it's 2026 and you don't think that there are website builders for small businesses? I'm sorry, but are you kidding me?
<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
I love the energy but this is incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people on the internet don't want to blog!
I thought it will be about<p><a href="https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/</a>
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> The concept of congregating in walled gardens owned by pedophilic fascist speed freaks<p>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<p>and it's mostly just the same walled garden rant we've all heard and even made a variant ourselves<p>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
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.
Agree but most small biz don't conceive or care about the internet this way