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Have a fucking website

otherstrangeness.com

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Re: Have a fucking website

#331

Post by carlosjobim »

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.

Re: Have a fucking website

#332

Post by blacklight »

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.

Re: Have a fucking website

#333

Post by stvltvs »

Torwald wrote: post #248
emaro wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed You probably already lost 90% of 'normies'. Most people won't be able to or willing to do that on their own. They could learn it of course, but they don't bother. https://xkcd.com/2501/

Make it 100%. I consider myself relatively "geeky", but I couldn't explain neither what a VPS or an nginx image is. "Normies" are people who are not sure whether the photos they took today with their phone are "on the phone" or "in the cloud" or maybe on the laptop also? Or what? Go from there to "nginx", I'll wait and don't hold my breath.

Or delete old photos because their phone is slow. Techies really overestimate the correctness of the mental models non-techies walk around with.

Re: Have a fucking website

#334

Post by 0_____0 »

replooda wrote: post #33
zjp wrote: post #23

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...

looks up latin conjugation chart

fuck this i'll learn mandarin instead

Re: Have a fucking website

#335

Post by carlosjobim »

happyraul wrote: post #238
Arainach wrote: post #14

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 accept that as a software developer, I have a myopic view on it, but it doesn't have to be hard. - Get a domain name - Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed - Write a plain text file with the info you want shown (hours, contact info, etc...) Yeah it's not sexy, but it's a start and it can be changed when time and interest allows.

That's not realistic for non-developers.

However, anybody can easily get a website: Just send an e-mail or make a call to any of the myriad web design people in your local area.

Re: Have a fucking website

#336

Post by rpdillon »

achenet wrote: post #301
dickiedyce wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I daren’t ask “What have Millennials ever done for us?” because I have a suspicion that it would be a surprisingly unfunny answer.

Google and Facebook? Minecraft? Most recent music?

That's Gen X. Google's founders were both born in 1973 and Notch was born in 1979. Zuckerberg was born in '84, so he's solidly a millennial.

Re: Have a fucking website

#337

Post by threetonesun »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #239
jstanley wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think. The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone. It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to , which is much less cool. It's a problem…

All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do it.

Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!

Re: Have a fucking website

#339

Post by carlosjobim »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #256
Arainach wrote: post #14

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…

Part of the problem is that there's no accepted standards for the minimum website worth making. This is very much a fault of the "website people" because they don't want to sell you a five page static site with the most complex feature being a php script that runs a couple for loops to put formatting around images and text. Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need (as evid…

>Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need

I disagree with this popular notion. A website should be a fully functioning sales system, so that it helps ease the admin burden of a small business, and also helps them get more sales.

Take the most common small businesses: Restaurants and accommodation. Both of these can save/make thousands of dollars per year by having their own ordering systems on their websites.

As for the other small business which perform more bespoke services, it's good to have offerings for set prices on the website, just so that customers know what they can expect when contacting for a bespoke solution.

Re: Have a fucking website

#340

Post by carlosjobim »

markdown wrote: post #165
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not ridiculously expensive. It's ridiculously cheap. $20 per month is nothing for a small business to spend on something that solves a problem.
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