7 ms·

I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and t

by goldcd 4y ago

I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The consumer/blog space of geocities, tripod and the like went to social media. Then we went through a period of "businesses putting up 10 pages for a fixed price" through first of all "a local web guy" then by themselves using Wix/WP/SS etc. I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone. Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. Can't really blame them. They can easily submit their static stuff - opening times, location and menu - and the complex stuff like a booking system, taking deposits, sending calendar reminders is just handled by a single entity who's good at this stuff. WP seems to occupy this weird middle-ground I don't see as being attractive to anyone. As a light user there are dedicated CMS for your industry - for the hardcore, you hand-build it. WP, paying for packages, and being on the hook when they don't play nice - Who-tf is the target market?

pipeline_peak 4y ago
I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”. It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more). Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon. Intentionally. If your users know they're manipulating files with your software and not "songs," "pictures," or "documents," they're less likely to subscribe to your cloud service that copies them between machines and more likely to find another application that can consume those files.
lancesells 4y ago
IMO Wordpress is very much in the domain of the SEO / Adwords crowd. People that want their site to rank and bring in traffic for ads. There are millions upon millions of domains that people want to make money on.
- nr2x 4y ago
  Chum boxes all the way down…
mitchdoogle 4y ago
What are the dedicated CMS for industries? And do they cost the same as WordPress (free)?
- stefanos82 4y ago
  Serious businesses don't go after the "free" concept, but prefer to pay thousands of dollars using CMS that well-known and experienced companies design and implement. An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5. [1] https://business.adobe.com/cy_en/products/experience-manager/headless-cms.html
  - goldcd 4y ago
    Or (at least where I am) I'm seeing ServiceNow appear - It's a e2e process engine, which just happens to also have GUI components that take the place of a traditional CMS.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There are various specialty ones - here’s one for parishes: https://4lpi.com/solutions/catholic-church-websites/ https://4lpi.com/solutions/catholic-church-websites/ Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.
- soared 4y ago
  Auto dealerships are a good example. They are run by some local guy who gets a little bit of support from corporate and probably has a low cost marketing agency. But none of them use Wordpress as there are CMSs for the industry. I don’t remember the old ones but the new startupy one is actually awesome but cannot seem to find their company name.
IAmEveryone 4y ago
Indeed. All the second-hand clothing stores are on instagram. All the drug dealers are on telegram.
Atsuii 4y ago
I think some of this is the result of how terrible Google search has gotten, although it maybe a chicken and the egg issue. It is just so much easier to find small businesses/individuals on social media/aggregators than on Google.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Social media is a spam filtering layer itself. Google on the open web has to filter out an enormous amount of spam on general search.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  I think this theory has cause and effect reversed.
austinl 4y ago
I was previously a PM at a company where I got to interview a lot of content creators on various platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Specifically creators with large enough followings where it was their sole source of income (typically $1K-$10K per month). I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.
- goldcd 4y ago
  Indeed. Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently. Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN. LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms. Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence. It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.
- yen223 4y ago
  I look at some of the channels I've subscribed to on YouTube - I have absolutely no idea if any of them have a personal website, since I have never had a reason to check. I don't think I'm alone in this regard.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Personal websites for Youtubers don't really make sense unless they have some kind of format that can't be handled via videos, playlists, or their descriptions. The only ones I've seen for Youtubers are cooking channels, where the description format is very poor for recipes.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I only stopped checking the websites of a couple YouTube channels I follow, because they stopped updating them reliably. I preferred that to checking on YouTube, because sometimes it takes me a bit to find a simple chronological list of videos from a channel, while the sites were just that, right on the front page.
rexf 4y ago
For years now, I've seen many restaurants rely on an Instagram account instead of an actual website. It's definitely easier for them to create an IG account than to pay someone (or a service) for a website. Also, posting to IG lets them market to their audience (instead of posting it to a website that presumably fewer people visit). Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.
- levesque 4y ago
  So it sounds like the restaurants are overestimating how well an instagram account responds to their needs. Maybe they do need to invest in a more traditional web page after all. I'll happily disregard any restaurant that forces me to log on whatever platform to view their menu.
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    But by catering to the Instagram crowd, they drive more engagement from the people on that platform. Maybe they are leaving money on the table, but if they are happy with the current performance, then that is their decision. Note: I also loathe Instagram menus
  - ulisesrmzroche 4y ago
    You're kinda doing a little logical fallacy there too.
    - levesque 4y ago
      Okay.
mbesto 4y ago
> I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone. And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.
- macintux 4y ago
  Speaking as an abstainer from all things Meta, that's depressing.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Burner?
    - DrSiemer 4y ago
      They'll still want your phone number and carrying a second phone just for those moments is a bit of a hassle. I'd be interested in a dual sim phone that had an instant "private mode" user account switch to the second sim. But even that would be a pita and it would severely limit the choice of hardware as well.
      - stavros 4y ago
        Why do you need to have the phone, beyond the initial registration?
        thaumasiotes 4y ago
        If you just register an account and use it forever, how is that different from "having an active Facebook account"? Initial registration would happen every time you want to do anything. (And you'd need a new phone... every time...)
- bambax 4y ago
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
*imply. Not infer. Inferring is what I do after they imply.
- goldcd 4y ago
  How right you are.
hnlmorg 4y ago
Agreed with everything you've said. I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.
dspillett 4y ago
> I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left). > WP, … Who-tf is the target market? People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.
- nulbyte 4y ago
  I think the real target market is plugin developers, who love the fact that you can get people to pay annual subscriptions for plugins providing some of the most mundane features I have ever seen.
htkibar 4y ago
In short - web is increasingly centralised, to the point it is not "personal websites etc." but "facebook / instagram / whatsapp".
omnimus 4y ago
WP is just very famous so clients often require it and know it. I don't think it has ever been choice developers would go for if they didn't have to. But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin. On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder. Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions. I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.
homero 4y ago
I've noticed Instagram only businesses. Hired a window tinting and pressure washer from there.
znpy 4y ago
> Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. My favourite restaurant has a website. It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".
akagusu 4y ago
As a business owner I can tell that a business can be pretty successful with just a Facebook page, an Instagram profile and Whatsapp as a contact channel. No website needed. Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people. Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there. This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".
crate_barre 4y ago

by goldcd 4y ago

pipeline_peak 4y ago

I see saying, blogs have definitely been shrinking. The web is too large and complex to be discovered unless your service is within one of the 5 or so major social platforms. To own a domain is almost a status symbol, letting users know “we are an established entity”. It’s pretty revealing when a local bar cover band or a Chinese restaurant has its own website. It’s almost always decrepit in maintenance and low traffic (as if it could handle more). Wordpress, Blogspot, and all these other template engine/blog platform things were the Web 2.0 answer, but I don’t think those types of services are going away. It’s a skill to implement a modern site not many people want to learn or hire when these platforms exist. Plenty of domain sites are powered by them. I just think this post is a telltale sign Wordpress is in a saturated market.

Robotbeat 4y ago
The fact that we’ve overcomplicated the skill set needed to maintain a “modern” website has helped contribute to this problem. A static website could be so bloody simple. Just save a bloody Word document to HTML with your pictures and menu and telephone number and open hours and links to maps and upload it to a folder. But… Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Even basic file handling skills are becoming uncommon. Intentionally. If your users know they're manipulating files with your software and not "songs," "pictures," or "documents," they're less likely to subscribe to your cloud service that copies them between machines and more likely to find another application that can consume those files.

lancesells 4y ago

IMO Wordpress is very much in the domain of the SEO / Adwords crowd. People that want their site to rank and bring in traffic for ads. There are millions upon millions of domains that people want to make money on.

nr2x 4y ago
Chum boxes all the way down…

mitchdoogle 4y ago

What are the dedicated CMS for industries? And do they cost the same as WordPress (free)?

stefanos82 4y ago
Serious businesses don't go after the "free" concept, but prefer to pay thousands of dollars using CMS that well-known and experienced companies design and implement. An example of such CMS for dedicated industries would be Adobe Experience Manager [1], previously known as Adobe CQ5. [1] https://business.adobe.com/cy_en/products/experience-manager/headless-cms.html
- goldcd 4y ago
  Or (at least where I am) I'm seeing ServiceNow appear - It's a e2e process engine, which just happens to also have GUI components that take the place of a traditional CMS.
bombcar 4y ago
There are various specialty ones - here’s one for parishes: https://4lpi.com/solutions/catholic-church-websites/ https://4lpi.com/solutions/catholic-church-websites/ Some of these will be built on Wordpress, others custom, but once you notice one for an industry you’ll see it everywhere.
soared 4y ago
Auto dealerships are a good example. They are run by some local guy who gets a little bit of support from corporate and probably has a low cost marketing agency. But none of them use Wordpress as there are CMSs for the industry. I don’t remember the old ones but the new startupy one is actually awesome but cannot seem to find their company name.

IAmEveryone 4y ago

Indeed. All the second-hand clothing stores are on instagram. All the drug dealers are on telegram.

Atsuii 4y ago

I think some of this is the result of how terrible Google search has gotten, although it maybe a chicken and the egg issue. It is just so much easier to find small businesses/individuals on social media/aggregators than on Google.

pixl97 4y ago
Social media is a spam filtering layer itself. Google on the open web has to filter out an enormous amount of spam on general search.
sanderjd 4y ago
I think this theory has cause and effect reversed.

austinl 4y ago

I was previously a PM at a company where I got to interview a lot of content creators on various platforms (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). Specifically creators with large enough followings where it was their sole source of income (typically $1K-$10K per month). I was initially shocked by how few of them had personal websites, but they're able to get by with the tools that the platform provides them. They didn't see much ROI in maintaining a personal site, and were more concerned with diversifying their audience across platforms.

goldcd 4y ago
Indeed. Even where you might once have thought "I'll add my own site, for the true fans, and take in orders of magnitude more money" - Now you can just add patreon (or an onlyfans) that handles that for you far more efficiently. Then there are more niche providers like Floatplane (the Linus Tech Tips side-hustle/life-boat), who'll give you more autonomy and a CDN. LinkTree was when the penny really dropped for me. Pretty much just an API landing page to point you to the other platforms. Maybe the only next step left, is stuff like https://nametag.org/ https://nametag.org/ - using an NFT to be your presence. It's all very odd, and as I said above, makes me feel very old.
yen223 4y ago
I look at some of the channels I've subscribed to on YouTube - I have absolutely no idea if any of them have a personal website, since I have never had a reason to check. I don't think I'm alone in this regard.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Personal websites for Youtubers don't really make sense unless they have some kind of format that can't be handled via videos, playlists, or their descriptions. The only ones I've seen for Youtubers are cooking channels, where the description format is very poor for recipes.
- corrral 4y ago
  I only stopped checking the websites of a couple YouTube channels I follow, because they stopped updating them reliably. I preferred that to checking on YouTube, because sometimes it takes me a bit to find a simple chronological list of videos from a channel, while the sites were just that, right on the front page.

rexf 4y ago

For years now, I've seen many restaurants rely on an Instagram account instead of an actual website. It's definitely easier for them to create an IG account than to pay someone (or a service) for a website. Also, posting to IG lets them market to their audience (instead of posting it to a website that presumably fewer people visit). Shame since I often want to view their menu, and IG is really aggressive about not showing you profiles & images unless you login. Viewing their menu on a 3rd party site (Google Maps, Yelp, delivery services, etc) is subpar and often out of date.

levesque 4y ago
So it sounds like the restaurants are overestimating how well an instagram account responds to their needs. Maybe they do need to invest in a more traditional web page after all. I'll happily disregard any restaurant that forces me to log on whatever platform to view their menu.
- yurishimo 4y ago
  But by catering to the Instagram crowd, they drive more engagement from the people on that platform. Maybe they are leaving money on the table, but if they are happy with the current performance, then that is their decision. Note: I also loathe Instagram menus
- ulisesrmzroche 4y ago
  You're kinda doing a little logical fallacy there too.
  - levesque 4y ago
    Okay.

mbesto 4y ago

> I've just had a bathroom fitted by a guy who functions purely on Instagram for his portfolio and Whatsapp for communication. As I'm old and curmudgeonly I wanted an email address, and when I got it, it's the one that came free with his phone. And work in anything international and this is essentially it. Want to find a smoothie shop in a beach town in Mexico? Instagram/FB + WhatsApp...thats it.

macintux 4y ago
Speaking as an abstainer from all things Meta, that's depressing.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Burner?
  - DrSiemer 4y ago
    They'll still want your phone number and carrying a second phone just for those moments is a bit of a hassle. I'd be interested in a dual sim phone that had an instant "private mode" user account switch to the second sim. But even that would be a pita and it would severely limit the choice of hardware as well.
    - stavros 4y ago
      Why do you need to have the phone, beyond the initial registration?
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        If you just register an account and use it forever, how is that different from "having an active Facebook account"? Initial registration would happen every time you want to do anything. (And you'd need a new phone... every time...)
bambax 4y ago

TheRealNGenius 4y ago

*imply. Not infer. Inferring is what I do after they imply.

goldcd 4y ago
How right you are.

hnlmorg 4y ago

Agreed with everything you've said. I'd also add that the rise of cloud computing hasn't helped either. WP was great when hosting consisted of shared LAMP services or hosting your own. But WP is a huge pain in the arse to host on services like AWS (as well as expensive too). So lots of companies that might have opted for a CMS solution like WP could easily be swayed to another alternative. While this wouldn't be the biggest contributing factor -- it's a drop in the ocean compared to the points you've raised -- it is yet another example of how the industry is moving on from WP style content.

dspillett 4y ago

> I think the "private website" space is shrinking - despite what adverts for Wix and Squarespace might infer. The fact that Wix and Squarespace have been advertising hard for a time, is a sign that they see the market approaching saturation, or shrinking, or both, and they are fighting the market (trying to drum up more interest) and each other (to get the bigger share of what is left). > WP, … Who-tf is the target market? People who don't like (or have available) an industry specific preferred solution nor the time to DIY, who have not yet hit the point of realising that growing with WP can be as time consuming as DIY.

nulbyte 4y ago
I think the real target market is plugin developers, who love the fact that you can get people to pay annual subscriptions for plugins providing some of the most mundane features I have ever seen.

htkibar 4y ago

In short - web is increasingly centralised, to the point it is not "personal websites etc." but "facebook / instagram / whatsapp".

omnimus 4y ago

WP is just very famous so clients often require it and know it. I don't think it has ever been choice developers would go for if they didn't have to. But other newer crop of CMSes - Craft, Ghost, Kirby, Twill, October, Grav... they don't have the legacy baggage and are just so much better for fully custom made sites. You basically get light web framework with super customisable admin. On the other hand for the "quick marketing site builder" - WP is getting eaten by Webflow and also Wix and their new new builder. Last nail to the coffin is that WP has become big target of hackers and its just hustle to keep it going compared to most other self hosted solutions. I don't think its websites going away so much as it's WP loosing to alternatives.

homero 4y ago

I've noticed Instagram only businesses. Hired a window tinting and pressure washer from there.

znpy 4y ago

> Even local restaurants seem to be changing - using aggregators as their primary touch-point. My favourite restaurant has a website. It's broken because "php couldn't find the necessary mysql extension to use Wordpress".

akagusu 4y ago

As a business owner I can tell that a business can be pretty successful with just a Facebook page, an Instagram profile and Whatsapp as a contact channel. No website needed. Unfortunately, websites cannot compete with aggregators. It's not about tech, it is about people. Aggregators have the only thing a business need to thrive: people. If you have a "private website", you need to drive people to it, but if you have an account on a platform, people are already there. This is why more and more businesses rely on aggregator instead of having a "private website".

crate_barre 4y ago