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Have a fucking website

otherstrangeness.com

201–210 of 559 posts

Re: Have a fucking website

#201
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.

Re: Have a fucking website

#202

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…

I think you underestimate how what you just wrote will fly over the head of most non technical people?

Re: Have a fucking website

#203
post #6

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.…

I agree.

I think modern overlay networks can navigate CG-NAT fine now. Other options include free cloudflare, or just a wireguard tunnel to a free tier VPS. On a similar point, I don't think enough people talk about how most western home internet connections now also have similar bandwidth as entire datacentres had in the 2000's too.

We still take for granted how hard basic web technology is for people who don't consider themselves technology people though.

Re: Have a fucking website

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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. 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 op…

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.

Re: Have a fucking website

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people hired someone for handling WordPress. Rally, most people are overwhelmed with that complexity.

Most people are indeed. Many of these people will also be able to complete very difficult tasks that you can't.

Re: Have a fucking website

#206

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.

I have done the same, but your website is really nice! And your photos are lovely. I like how you've indicated which cameras and gear you use for certain trips.

That 600mm Sony lens must be fun to carry around. I used to have a Tamron 150-600mm lens for my Nikon, but my wife said it looked ridiculous, so I got rid of it. So now I'm mostly on M43 for portability.

Re: Have a fucking website

#207

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 Ca…

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: https://neocities.org/

Re: Have a fucking website

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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. 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 op…

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!

Re: Have a fucking website

#209
post #160

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…

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.

Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be difficult to outrank them.

Re: Have a fucking website

#210
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.

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