9 ms·

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? T

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 CapEx and finances. Yes, even your favorite one. The very short version: running a small business like a restaraunt takes all your resources and then 20% more. Long hours, hard work, all your time. You do not have 2 hours to learn about LLMs or to pick which company to pay. From there: * Most people don't know what they want * Most people don't know the words for what they want * Even if you say "I want a website", what do you want it do look like? To say? These people aren't experts in web UX nor should they be. * You have some HTML and images. Where do they go now? Again people literally don't know what they want or need. If you realize you need a "web host", how do you pick a trustworthy one? How do you know if it's a good price? How do you get a domain name? How do you get the files onto the server? * Do you want people to be able to buy things? Now you're taking payment methods and have security concerns. * Your site is live. You want to change something on it. How do you do that? Where are the original files? How do you change them? How do you get the changes on the server? It's not "Hey, write me a website". There are lots of steps that assume a lot of knowledge, and it is easier, faster, and better for people to focus on their expertise and just pay some service for their web shop.

squirrellous 7mo ago
Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.
- dumpsterdiver 7mo ago
  Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?
  - tossandthrow 7mo ago
    Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree. Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure. Just like the government finances roads, etc.
    - ghurtado 7mo ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?
      - Dylan16807 7mo ago
        We should be making sure everyone has internet access, but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so no I don't think free internet access should come before that.
      - tossandthrow 7mo ago
        Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue. Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.
    - cindyllm 7mo ago
      [dead]
  - palmotea 7mo ago
    > Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it? Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.
    - 999900000999 7mo ago
      Alright cool. Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants. Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.
- lneves 7mo ago
  Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)
  - komali2 7mo ago
    I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!
    - xigoi 7mo ago
      Did you need an account to read the Yellow Pages?
      - lobf 7mo ago
        No, you received piles of them on your doorstep whether you liked it or not.
- voidUpdate 7mo ago
  Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for that but I've heard it used to be a thing)
  - johannes1234321 7mo ago
    Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things. Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.
    - voidUpdate 7mo ago
      Ah, fair enough
ThrowawayTestr 7mo ago
Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.
- eastbound 7mo ago
  It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer their business, and not connect often — I bet the security is more costly that a technical audience.
- markdown 7mo ago
  Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.
  - esseph 7mo ago
    You're not paying for the hosting, not why would they try to sell you that, really? People pay them for everything else around the hosting.
  - pibaker 7mo ago
    Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use. You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
    - markdown 7mo ago
      > 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 that simply go to pay for more ads.
janalsncm 7mo ago
Yeah, setting up a website is a pain. But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
- miramba 7mo ago
  Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
  - LtWorf 7mo ago
    IG is only for the regular customers.
    - johannes1234321 7mo ago
      Not really. I don't have an IG account, but when picking a place ein an area I don't know, it is the place to get an impression of the place. The visual part tells a lot about the place, while many websites maybe got a photo from the outside, if at all.
      - kakacik 7mo ago
        Google maps works the same way, thats the default in most of the world. I don't even know anyone who has IG account, myself including. Everybody has google account, not that you need one to browse (more or less) categorized photos on maps.
      - carlosjobim 7mo ago
        How do you even know that a restaurant exists in an area you don't know? Not through Instagram, but through a web search or Google Maps. But you're right, having a ton of good images on your website is one of the most important things for restaurants and most other businesses. And most fail in this aspect.
pigeons 7mo ago
And security
- dd8601fn 7mo ago
  Most of these people just need like two or three static pages and a domain name. Same as it ever was.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hoppp 7mo ago
I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage. Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a domain name. But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"
- Muller20 7mo ago
  I think you are overestimating the knowledge of the average person. You still need to have an idea of what is html, DNS, cludflare. Most people wouldn't even know where to start looking. But I agree that once you know how to create a website, generating a landing page with Claude is painless.
  - gambiting 7mo ago
    I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10 years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything more than that. My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.
  - hoppp 7mo ago
    Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is too much. People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.
ehnto 7mo ago
I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated. Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps. Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it. Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.
- jstanley 7mo ago
  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.
  - dv_dt 7mo ago
    The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
  - komali2 7mo ago
    > The richest person I know talks to robots all the time. I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves. If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams. I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
techpression 7mo ago
Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.
lentil_soup 7mo ago
I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account, drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why is it so hard to have a static website now?
- fsflover 7mo ago
  You may like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772
- vaylian 7mo ago
  Neocities is picking up the slack: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
  - arc-in-space 7mo ago
    God damn those featured pages load so fast.
brap 7mo ago
Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?
- madaxe_again 7mo ago
  Yes. It’s also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with property listings, three days later. Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
  - ArlenBales 7mo ago
    It's not that they don't want to pay, but they don't want to pay outrageously. Squarespace, etc. are stupid expensive for most websites. $5/mo is the limit for a lot of businesses, especially when they can't tell if having a website will even improve their traffic over just having a social media page. The administration and billing side can also be confusing for a lot of non-technical business owners.
happyraul 7mo ago
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.
- emaro 7mo ago
  > 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/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  - Torwald 7mo ago
    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.
    - stvltvs 7mo ago
      Or delete old photos because their phone is slow. Techies really overestimate the correctness of the mental models non-techies walk around with.
  - silvestrov 7mo ago
    closer to 99.9%
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    The reality is much much easier. You just google "I want a website" or "give me a .com" and click links until you get some free website builder or a webhosting company who will take your credit card and give you very easy to follow directions to choose a domain name and then takes you right into their online builder where everything is super user friendly and not much different than leaving a post on a social media platform. Most people would absolutely be able to get a website. It might be the best way to do it, but it would get done.
chrysoprace 7mo ago
To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7 days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily the least of their concerns.
- 6510 7mo ago
  I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free. I have a web app that is a html document with an [edit] button at the end. It points at edit.html which has a textarea, a password field and a submit button. (Below is a list of links to all pages in the folder starting with index-) The textarea shows the middle chunk of the html document. You edit it, fill out the password (the browser will do it) and press the save button. It posts to save.php which constructs a new index.html and save a copy as index-2026-03-18.html The link to the copy shows up on edit.html The edit link there points to edit.html?file=index-2026-03-18.html if you save it that will become the new index.html (it refuses to edit anything that isn't "index-\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\.html") If each menu entry is: `<tr><td>Beer</td><td>$3.50</td></tr>` They can just edit, delete or copy and paste it. Simply: `<br>Beer $3.50` Would work just as well. If they screw up they can put back an older version. Put your phone number on the edit page. Write some html tags on a napkin. `<br> <b> <i> <h3> <img> <a>` They want more pages? make the /about folder drop index edit and save.php into it, remind them to make a link to it on the front page and they will figure it out.
  - carlosjobim 7mo ago
    > I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free. Why? A website is a standard business expense. Should their accountant work for free also? And their waiters and kitchen staff?
    - alsetmusic 7mo ago
      At first, I agreed with the sentiment that the earlier poster ought to do them a favor. But you're right. Business expense. Although, I suppose if they (the proprietors) had up-to-date creds and such, maybe offering to remove the one item from the menu as favor would be a nice way to become a favorite customer. The rest is clearly their problem. And I'm pretty sure from the description that they won't have all the necessary documentation.
cucumber3732842 7mo ago
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 evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  >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.
  - tarekabi 7mo ago
    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.
    - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
      This is exactly what I'm complaining about. Your average small business website doesn't need to do any of that. It needs to "be Facebook" as in provide a place to post static details, contact information and content updated on a limited basis. Doing those things doesn't add enough value beyond what Facebook offers to be worth the cost and maintenance burden. You keep trying to sell these people a fancy Mercedes station wagon when what they want is a Dodge Journey.
Mercuriusdream 7mo ago
I miss those cheap something-middle-in-webhosts-and-microblogs hosts
alnwlsn 7mo ago
I saw a meme one time that went something like this: "AI is so cool, I asked ChatGPT to combine a card game with a flight simulator and it did it!" "Yeah, that is pretty cool I guess." "My question for you is, what do I do with the code it gave me?" "What?" "Where do I put the code to make a game?"
- vinceguidry 7mo ago
  Just ask ChatGPT for that too, it'll happily walk you through standing up Unity or whatever.
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    I just wanted to see what was possible with Codex and Claude Code. Without my ever getting involved with the actual work, both were able to create rudimentary weather apps and load them on my phone. I think I had to follow instructions for what it couldn't access, but I fed it error messages any time something didn't work and was pretty impressed what could be accomplished.
ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you. Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol
tmtvl 7mo ago
The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.
oflannabhra 7mo ago
I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds. I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far. I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.
- ArlenBales 7mo ago
  Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS? The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
  - el_benhameen 7mo ago
    I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free. Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.
  - camdenreslink 7mo ago
    It might just be static site hosting for businesses that want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do it.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
kelvinjps10 7mo ago
There is now platforms that make it as easy as social media sites. wordpress shopify etc
calepayson 7mo ago
My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step. I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian. In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).
- disgruntledphd2 7mo ago
  Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  - calepayson 7mo ago
    Brilliant hahaha
- thwarted 7mo ago
  > I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step. This has been a serious regression in the industry for a while: popular operating systems (I'm looking at you, Windows) don't encourage and are not set up for their users to program or even do the bare minimum of random automation unless it's embedded in an application and meant for automating just that application (excel macros). You are encouraged and directed to install and use "apps" which are either a one-size-fits-all lowest common denominator or a tries-do-everything dog's breakfast frustration. The Commodore 64 turned on instantly and said "READY." and effectively gave you a blank canvas to poke (no pun intended) at. It was BASIC, but it was a real (if simple and limited) programming language and you could get immediate feedback and satisfaction from playing with it to learn what it could do. The syntax of BASIC is simple, the stdlib is comprehensive and unopinionated. There was nothing to download to get started to try to get that initial dopamine hit and to start to realize the true power of what computers can do and what you could make them do. If you want a better chance at getting someone excited about programming, there are much better places to start than VSCode. pico8, scratch, even the browser's developer toolbar is more accessible than VSCode.
thwarted 7mo ago
I read comments such as: >> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing? as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.
brycewray 7mo ago
Reminds me a little of something I wrote once: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/ https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/
browningstreet 7mo ago
I’ve built websites for clients. Some of those clients were restaurants and small businesses. Often professionals. Send any of them a list of 5 questions, the likelihood that you get 5 answers is close to nil. These people might be good at what they do, but a website might as well be city planning to them.
neonstatic 7mo ago
Yes! It's just like with any other process. Want to get a visa to x country? Seems like an easy thing, but in many cases it isn't. That's why you contact a visa company. They do things for you to make it happen. It's not that what they do is too hard for you to do, it's about time.

squirrellous 7mo ago

Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.

dumpsterdiver 7mo ago
Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it?
- tossandthrow 7mo ago
  Such proposal doesn't need justification. You can merely disagree. Anyhow. The justification is that it is an important part of a communications infrastructure. Just like the government finances roads, etc.
  - ghurtado 7mo ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?
    - Dylan16807 7mo ago
      We should be making sure everyone has internet access, but hosting some basic pages is about 1000x cheaper, so no I don't think free internet access should come before that.
    - tossandthrow 7mo ago
      Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue. Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
- palmotea 7mo ago
  > Do you have any justification in mind for the “free service” being funded by tax payers? Why should it be free for the people who need it, and why should tax payers fund it? Because the government should provide useful services. It should be funded by tax dollars because I'm tried of libertarians, and it's well-demonstrated that the free market has consumer hostile incentives that I'm sick of.
  - 999900000999 7mo ago
    Alright cool. Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants. Craigslist basically is this, and it's more or less free.
lneves 7mo ago
Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)
- komali2 7mo ago
  I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!
  - xigoi 7mo ago
    Did you need an account to read the Yellow Pages?
    - lobf 7mo ago
      No, you received piles of them on your doorstep whether you liked it or not.
voidUpdate 7mo ago
Wouldnt ISPs give you a bit of web space with your internet plan back in the day? (I'm too young to have been around for that but I've heard it used to be a thing)
- johannes1234321 7mo ago
  Yes, but that's an ugly address tied to your provider. And you had to learn rearing a website (in Frontpage?) and FTP. Also expectations on websites were different. They were allowed to be fun and didn't have to care about different kidb sof devices, accessibility and all these things. Back in the day™ this worked somewhat as people who were online and a somewhat level of technical interest. Else they wouldn't have used the Internet. The average restaurant owner doesn't have that interest. They like cooking or talking to customers on the bar or something, but not doing Webdesign. Probably they only use the desktop/laptop for preparing numbers for tax purpose unless they can fully outsource that.
  - voidUpdate 7mo ago
    Ah, fair enough

ThrowawayTestr 7mo ago

Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.

eastbound 7mo ago
It is expensive. Add to this: On this audience, people will lose their passwords, leave outdated information, transfer their business, and not connect often — I bet the security is more costly that a technical audience.
markdown 7mo ago
Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.
- esseph 7mo ago
  You're not paying for the hosting, not why would they try to sell you that, really? People pay them for everything else around the hosting.
- pibaker 7mo ago
  Except Squarespace does not just sell hosting. Their main business is selling a CMS and website builder that is supposed to be easy enough for complete noobs to use. You and I know how to build and host websites, ok, but it had likely taken us dozens if not hundreds of hours of learning everything between TCP/IP to ARIA attributes to get here. The average small business owner does not have this knowledge or the time to learn it. They keep Squarespace in business.
  - markdown 7mo ago
    > 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 that simply go to pay for more ads.

janalsncm 7mo ago

Yeah, setting up a website is a pain. But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.

miramba 7mo ago
Menus change ie seasonal, and there is a daily changing handwritten chalkboard: Make a photo, put it on IG. Hours change: This week only opened from 8 instead 7: Post it on IG. Who has the time to answer a phonecall? And who uses phone numbers these days anyway? Text me on whatsapp like everyone else does. Disclaimer: Don‘t use IG. But if I want to know if our favourite pizza place is open (cook travels to football games a lot), I ask my wife to check on Insta.
- LtWorf 7mo ago
  IG is only for the regular customers.
  - johannes1234321 7mo ago
    Not really. I don't have an IG account, but when picking a place ein an area I don't know, it is the place to get an impression of the place. The visual part tells a lot about the place, while many websites maybe got a photo from the outside, if at all.
    - kakacik 7mo ago
      Google maps works the same way, thats the default in most of the world. I don't even know anyone who has IG account, myself including. Everybody has google account, not that you need one to browse (more or less) categorized photos on maps.
    - carlosjobim 7mo ago
      How do you even know that a restaurant exists in an area you don't know? Not through Instagram, but through a web search or Google Maps. But you're right, having a ton of good images on your website is one of the most important things for restaurants and most other businesses. And most fail in this aspect.

pigeons 7mo ago

And security

dd8601fn 7mo ago
Most of these people just need like two or three static pages and a domain name. Same as it ever was.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

hoppp 7mo ago

I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage. Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a domain name. But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"

Muller20 7mo ago
I think you are overestimating the knowledge of the average person. You still need to have an idea of what is html, DNS, cludflare. Most people wouldn't even know where to start looking. But I agree that once you know how to create a website, generating a landing page with Claude is painless.
- gambiting 7mo ago
  I mean I made a website for my mum's store probably 10 years ago, just a landing page, contact details and a map showing where it is + some pictures, put it on Digital Ocean on a basic Linux instance and I haven't touched it since. I don't think I even have the passwords for it anymore - but it just lives there for over a decade without any trouble, the DI host costs like $5 a month and that's the only thing we ever really had to worry about. The website is a basic HTML, it doesn't need to be anything more than that. My general point is that if that's all you need(and I'd argue most businesses really need just that) then basic infrastructure is both really easy to set up and really resilient long term. That Apache server(or whatever it is, I honestly don't remember) isn't going to randomly fall over on a Tuesday for no reason, unless the fabric of the internet changes then it will continue serving HTML websites forever.
- hoppp 7mo ago
  Overestimating? I did comment that even buying a name is too much. People who are non-technical will never have a website, but the barrier of entry is low for anyone who has access to the right information.

ehnto 7mo ago

I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated. Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps. Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it. Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.

jstanley 7mo ago
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.
- dv_dt 7mo ago
  The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
- komali2 7mo ago
  > The richest person I know talks to robots all the time. I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves. If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams. I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.

techpression 7mo ago

Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.

lentil_soup 7mo ago

I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account, drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why is it so hard to have a static website now?

fsflover 7mo ago
You may like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269772
vaylian 7mo ago
Neocities is picking up the slack: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- arc-in-space 7mo ago
  God damn those featured pages load so fast.

brap 7mo ago

Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?

madaxe_again 7mo ago
Yes. It’s also idiot-proof enough that I sent a tech illiterate estate agent friend there with instructions to ask ChatGPT if he had any questions. He was up and running, with property listings, three days later. Honestly, this is a solved problem - the actual problem, if you talk to folks who maintain only a FB page, is that they don’t want to pay.
- ArlenBales 7mo ago
  It's not that they don't want to pay, but they don't want to pay outrageously. Squarespace, etc. are stupid expensive for most websites. $5/mo is the limit for a lot of businesses, especially when they can't tell if having a website will even improve their traffic over just having a social media page. The administration and billing side can also be confusing for a lot of non-technical business owners.

happyraul 7mo ago

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.

emaro 7mo ago
> 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/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- Torwald 7mo ago
  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.
  - stvltvs 7mo ago
    Or delete old photos because their phone is slow. Techies really overestimate the correctness of the mental models non-techies walk around with.
- silvestrov 7mo ago
  closer to 99.9%
- autoexec 7mo ago
  The reality is much much easier. You just google "I want a website" or "give me a .com" and click links until you get some free website builder or a webhosting company who will take your credit card and give you very easy to follow directions to choose a domain name and then takes you right into their online builder where everything is super user friendly and not much different than leaving a post on a social media platform. Most people would absolutely be able to get a website. It might be the best way to do it, but it would get done.

chrysoprace 7mo ago

To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7 days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily the least of their concerns.

6510 7mo ago
I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free. I have a web app that is a html document with an [edit] button at the end. It points at edit.html which has a textarea, a password field and a submit button. (Below is a list of links to all pages in the folder starting with index-) The textarea shows the middle chunk of the html document. You edit it, fill out the password (the browser will do it) and press the save button. It posts to save.php which constructs a new index.html and save a copy as index-2026-03-18.html The link to the copy shows up on edit.html The edit link there points to edit.html?file=index-2026-03-18.html if you save it that will become the new index.html (it refuses to edit anything that isn't "index-\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\.html") If each menu entry is: `<tr><td>Beer</td><td>$3.50</td></tr>` They can just edit, delete or copy and paste it. Simply: `<br>Beer $3.50` Would work just as well. If they screw up they can put back an older version. Put your phone number on the edit page. Write some html tags on a napkin. `<br> <b> <i> <h3> <img> <a>` They want more pages? make the /about folder drop index edit and save.php into it, remind them to make a link to it on the front page and they will figure it out.
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  > I think if you are half capable you should just adopt the project and do it for free. Why? A website is a standard business expense. Should their accountant work for free also? And their waiters and kitchen staff?
  - alsetmusic 7mo ago
    At first, I agreed with the sentiment that the earlier poster ought to do them a favor. But you're right. Business expense. Although, I suppose if they (the proprietors) had up-to-date creds and such, maybe offering to remove the one item from the menu as favor would be a nice way to become a favorite customer. The rest is clearly their problem. And I'm pretty sure from the description that they won't have all the necessary documentation.

cucumber3732842 7mo ago

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 evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)

carlosjobim 7mo ago
>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.
- tarekabi 7mo ago
  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.
  - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
    This is exactly what I'm complaining about. Your average small business website doesn't need to do any of that. It needs to "be Facebook" as in provide a place to post static details, contact information and content updated on a limited basis. Doing those things doesn't add enough value beyond what Facebook offers to be worth the cost and maintenance burden. You keep trying to sell these people a fancy Mercedes station wagon when what they want is a Dodge Journey.

Mercuriusdream 7mo ago

I miss those cheap something-middle-in-webhosts-and-microblogs hosts

alnwlsn 7mo ago

I saw a meme one time that went something like this: "AI is so cool, I asked ChatGPT to combine a card game with a flight simulator and it did it!" "Yeah, that is pretty cool I guess." "My question for you is, what do I do with the code it gave me?" "What?" "Where do I put the code to make a game?"

vinceguidry 7mo ago
Just ask ChatGPT for that too, it'll happily walk you through standing up Unity or whatever.
- alsetmusic 7mo ago
  I just wanted to see what was possible with Codex and Claude Code. Without my ever getting involved with the actual work, both were able to create rudimentary weather apps and load them on my phone. I think I had to follow instructions for what it couldn't access, but I fed it error messages any time something didn't work and was pretty impressed what could be accomplished.

ToucanLoucan 7mo ago

I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you. Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol

tmtvl 7mo ago

The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.

oflannabhra 7mo ago

I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds. I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far. I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.

ArlenBales 7mo ago
Once he creates the website, does he also host it and handle the billing for his clients? Is he using a website builder like Square space or hosting on AWS? The hurdle is more than just building the site, a lot of really small non-technical businesses don't want the trouble of handling the billing and maintenance of the site.
- el_benhameen 7mo ago
  I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free. Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.
- camdenreslink 7mo ago
  It might just be static site hosting for businesses that want a real website, and not just a Facebook page. Static site hosting is so simple, I believe a 12 year old could do it.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]

kelvinjps10 7mo ago

There is now platforms that make it as easy as social media sites. wordpress shopify etc

calepayson 7mo ago

My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step. I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian. In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).

disgruntledphd2 7mo ago
Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- calepayson 7mo ago
  Brilliant hahaha
thwarted 7mo ago
> I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step. This has been a serious regression in the industry for a while: popular operating systems (I'm looking at you, Windows) don't encourage and are not set up for their users to program or even do the bare minimum of random automation unless it's embedded in an application and meant for automating just that application (excel macros). You are encouraged and directed to install and use "apps" which are either a one-size-fits-all lowest common denominator or a tries-do-everything dog's breakfast frustration. The Commodore 64 turned on instantly and said "READY." and effectively gave you a blank canvas to poke (no pun intended) at. It was BASIC, but it was a real (if simple and limited) programming language and you could get immediate feedback and satisfaction from playing with it to learn what it could do. The syntax of BASIC is simple, the stdlib is comprehensive and unopinionated. There was nothing to download to get started to try to get that initial dopamine hit and to start to realize the true power of what computers can do and what you could make them do. If you want a better chance at getting someone excited about programming, there are much better places to start than VSCode. pico8, scratch, even the browser's developer toolbar is more accessible than VSCode.

thwarted 7mo ago

I read comments such as: >> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing? as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.

brycewray 7mo ago

Reminds me a little of something I wrote once: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/ https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/

browningstreet 7mo ago

I’ve built websites for clients. Some of those clients were restaurants and small businesses. Often professionals. Send any of them a list of 5 questions, the likelihood that you get 5 answers is close to nil. These people might be good at what they do, but a website might as well be city planning to them.

neonstatic 7mo ago

Yes! It's just like with any other process. Want to get a visa to x country? Seems like an easy thing, but in many cases it isn't. That's why you contact a visa company. They do things for you to make it happen. It's not that what they do is too hard for you to do, it's about time.