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Have a fucking website

otherstrangeness.com

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Re: Have a fucking website

#371

Post by gammalost »

carlosjobim wrote: post #331

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…

Do you suggest small businesses send tattoos and freshly baked bread in the mail? I do not how they benefit from it

Re: Have a fucking website

#372

Post by LatencyKills »

abustamam wrote: post #299
LatencyKills wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know this place even exists without any information? You want to find an antique book store in another state. How do you find it? You search the web. And what information bubbles to the top of the search results? Answer: businesses with websites. If you are a business owner, you will lose customers without a website, because that is how most people will find you. You might not like it... but that is the…

If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look at Google maps. "Minneapolis antique bookstores." I'll look at pics, see if the vibe is cool, etc. Relying on Google SEO is a recipe for disaster in my experience because there's no guarantee that the bookstore is even in or near Minneapolis. Other people probably browse the web differently though. I honestly would not expect an antique bookstore to have a websi…

> If I'm looking for a physical place I usually just look at Google maps.

Ah yes... I'm sure that is what 99% of people do. /s

You don't like reality... and that's fine. You do you. But, most businesses do need a web presence if they want be be discovered by the majority of potential customers.

Re: Have a fucking website

#373

Post by bigfishrunning »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357
SecretDreams wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading. Otherwise, totally agree.

Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.

Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.

When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.

Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.

Re: Have a fucking website

#374

Post by notlenin »

rglover wrote: post #360

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.

not 100% true - I know some friends that would like a website, just they haven't found the means to get one. Even WordPress can be somewhat complicated to setup sometimes.

Re: Have a fucking website

#375

Post by lametti »

hackemmy wrote: post #347

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 i…

What's wrong with a README? It's as close to a website as one can get within a self-contained repository, and is most likely to be kept up to date with any given version of the project. If there is one document available anywhere that describes a project, I would hope it is the README.

Re: Have a fucking website

#376

Post by SecretDreams »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357
SecretDreams wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading. Otherwise, totally agree.

Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.

Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot on priority and values. I value spending time with my family and I will often trade money for time to enable that.

Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.

Re: Have a fucking website

#377

Post by appreciatorBus »

Planktonne wrote: post #220
rkachowski wrote: post #76

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 'owning your own content' no longer have as much force.

The comment you just made will also be scraped and added to LLM training corpora.

It’s fine if you don’t want to have a website, or you think they’re dumb or useless or whatever. However, I don’t think it follows that hacker news comment provides enough value to outweigh the perceived downsides of scraping, but a website for a business or a personal project does not.

Re: Have a fucking website

#378

Post by tarekabi »

carlosjobim wrote: post #339
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ow…

This is exactly the problem we kept running into. The website exists, the traffic comes, and then it does nothing. A visitor at 11pm has a question and leaves because there's no one to answer it. The "Book a Demo" button assumes they're already sold enough to commit to a 45-minute call with a stranger. Most aren't.

The website being static is the real failure mode, not the absence of one.

Re: Have a fucking website

#379

Post by cxr »

pibaker wrote: post #280
markdown wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use. Yeah, like I said, it costs close to $0. > The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business. My point is, SquareSpace could charge a fraction of what they do and still be rolling in cash. Instead they charge ridiculous fees tha…

To think about this from another angle, imagine yourself as a worker selling your labor in exchange for money. Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim in cash, or would you take as much your company is willing to pay you to work there? If your answer is no, then why should a company selling a product act any differently? If squarespace following f…

> Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim in cash

You're posing the question like there's an obvious answer, and that that answer is "no". In reality, all kinds of people do this all the time.

Re: Have a fucking website

#380

Post by Hoasi »

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.

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