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Your website is not for you

websmith.studio

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131–140 of 207 posts

Re: Your website is not for you

#131

Post by josefresco »

big85 wrote: post #6

Perhaps better stated: Your company's website isn't for you, it's to pursue the agenda of your company. Your personal homepage is for you, if you can free yourself from view count as a success metric.

Came here to say basically this. Your company website is not for you, but your personal website should be. I spent years chasing Google traffic and useless business goals for my own blog until I realized I should publish for me, not the users.

And if I do something that Google doesn't like... who cares? It's for me and Google will come crawling (literally) back anyways.

Currently I use my blog as a bookmarking service. Instead of a browser bookmark, I built a Chrome extension that simply posts the link to my blog as a new post where it's public, and easily discoverable from any device BY ME!

Re: Your website is not for you

#133

Post by nephihaha »

dwd wrote: post #66
BoredPositron wrote: post #13

Your commercial website is not for you. Would be a better title.

Or non-personal. There are non-commercial websites such as Government that put a lot of effort into focussing on the user. Some of the Gov design systems are well worth looking at. https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/

I thought the object of government, legal and complaints websites was to reduce customer interaction? The British government is notorious for bad or barely functional websites.

Re: Your website is not for you

#134

Post by gavmor »

ozim wrote: post #95
xyzelement wrote: post #28

The 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…

Sounds like a case of Chesterton's Pothole (nee Fence)—a glaringly obvious suboptimal implementation that's there for an undocumented reason.

Re: Your website is not for you

#135

Post by taneq »

DrewADesign wrote: post #85
xyzelement wrote: post #28

The 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…

Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because the…

> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work.

Is it really that clear? Or do we just think so because most of us here are devs, while everyone else is thinking “Wow what happened? That codebase was great until suddenly it wasn’t.”

Re: Your website is not for you

#136

Post by nxpnsv »

dgellow wrote: post #55
nxpnsv wrote: post #38

No, my website is for me and not everything is a product

I had the same knee jerk reaction but after reading the article I think it is clear they are talking about company websites

Yes, I know, but I just couldn't get over that initial reaction...

Re: Your website is not for you

#137

Post by 16mb »

joshuamoyers wrote: post #114
whstl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also very often don’t understand what’s easy and what’s hard to implement, what’s a real priority vs a nice to have, and have extremely strong opinions against off-the-shelf components and prefer building everything from scratch. Also: The lesson of “don’t rewrite” from Joel Spolsky seems internalized in the minds of every developer, but "rewriting from scratch" is basically how designers operate by default. Mos…

except agentic engineering mostly invalidates this with regard to marketing websites. nothing is really all that hard to implement on mostly static site.

Those were never really that difficult to implement. The agentic way still requires proper communication, which is often what projects lack so I don’t see it changing much.

Re: Your website is not for you

#138

Post by tomnipotent »

ragnese wrote: post #46
xyzelement wrote: post #28

The 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…

Yep. I've learned that lesson more than once. Maybe one of these days it'll stick... :p Specifically, I'm not a "designer", but I regularly end up making/changing UIs (mobile apps, web apps/pages, etc). When it comes to design, it really matters who the target audience is. If you're creating a UI for "mass market", you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances what your average user expects, general…

> you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances

Something that's always stuck with me is a bit from the book "Don't Make Me Think" about cost vs. value in attention and complexity, that when you add a feature used by only a small percentage of users you're "taxing" 100% of users for the benefit of a few. That you should optimize for the common path and not edge cases. Over two decades later I still find this an exceedingly difficult challenge to juggle that doesn't just mean hiding advanced features behind extra menus.

Re: Your website is not for you

#139

Post by miki123211 »

xyzelement wrote: post #28

The 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…

A bad designer can design a good-looking password form. A mediocre designer anticipates that they need to design for the case where the passwords don't match. A great designer can figure out that this particular product should actually be using magic links and not passwords.

Re: Your website is not for you

#140

Post by simpaticoder »

satvikpendem wrote: post #122
monokai_nl wrote: post #87

My 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.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were less of a distinction? Think of old school mom-and-pop shops, which were actually a reflection of who they were, personally, vs. Wal-Mart or Target. Which main street do you prefer?
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