Yes, it is.
Your website is not for you
121–130 of 207 posts
Re: Your website is not for you
#122My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.) The article states "A website isn't art". This product mindset fundamentally makes the web a boring place. I would personally welcome all websites that are art.
They're not talking about personal websites, they're talking about business ones.
Re: Your website is not for you
#123The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
I see it with new hires in our company. We are small SaaS app. Starry eyed business person thinks he can tell us whatever there is about making websites because our landing page is basically neglected. Business we are in B2B and this specific product is not getting customers this way. We get customers via CEO or business partners connections. All the “organic traffic” is waste of time for us because when they hear th…
Is your pricing on your website? That's a way to cut down on the wasted time
Re: Your website is not for you
#124I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here
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Re: Your website is not for you
#125I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here
Agree. Show people your vision. Make them understand it the way you see it. Otherwise you're publishing the same ineffective pablum we see everywhere.
Exactly! This whole sentiment reminds me of the Jobs quote "people don't know what they want until you show it to them".
Re: Your website is not for you
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see it with new hires in our company. We are small SaaS app. Starry eyed business person thinks he can tell us whatever there is about making websites because our landing page is basically neglected. Business we are in B2B and this specific product is not getting customers this way. We get customers via CEO or business partners connections. All the “organic traffic” is waste of time for us because when they hear th…
Is your pricing on your website? That's a way to cut down on the wasted time
I’ve noticed a lot of business models intentionally try to funnel you through their sales pipeline and only expose the price after “getting to know you”.
Which is slang for “getting a chance to plead their case for why it’s going to be so bloody expensive”.
Re: Your website is not for you
#127Built a small SaaS recently and this hit hard. I kept asking
myself "who is this paragraph for?" while writing the landing.
Ended up cutting almost 60% of what I had planned. Most of it was reassuring myself, not the visitor. The stuff that survived were the things that confronted them — like a 4,000-dot grid showing every week of an average human life.
The post is right that visitors aren't there to be impressed by you. But I'd add: they're not there to be reassured either. They're there to be confronted with something they already suspected was true.
Re: Your website is not for you
#128The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true. In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack. Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job
I would qualify that as most graphic designers know what they’re doing, when they’re working in graphic design media: logos, magazines, billboards, and other print media.
Unfortunately, our industry (software) has shifted towards hiring graphic designers to do user interface design, a task which they’re often grossly unqualified for. This is how we get interfaces which are attractive but frustrating and difficult to use, both for beginner/non-technical users and for expert/power users, for different reasons. Beginners need intuitive interfaces with high discoverability for the most important operations and power users need efficiency and clean access to automation tools for the most common tasks.
Graphic designers often sacrifice power user features entirely in favour of minimalism. They also sacrifice intuitiveness in favour of their own artistic vision. In both cases they frequently sacrifice information density in favour of minimalism, making it hard for users to quickly locate the information they need. This is especially egregious on mobile-first designs where the accuracy of mouse pointers and the information capacity of large displays is ignored.
Re: Your website is not for you
#129[flagged]
Re: Your website is not for you
#130True website is not for you and in the age for AI is not even for people. Its for AI agents reading your website and deciding what to do with it: recommend it, skip it, integrate with it, etc.
Yes more and more this will be the case. Websites will not be for people, because most people don't go to websites for the experience, they go there for information. And if a smart search engine can show them what they need to know without actaully showing the website, that's good enough in most cases.
You can stop worrying about layout, styles, colors, fonts, responsive design... just put the information on a page so that AI can understand it.