Hacker News Reader

Comment by funkymike | Hacker News Reader

Every time I look a restaurant's web page and see delays downloading javascript crap when all I want to do is see a menu I think a person could make a good living just building basic HTML & CSS websites for small businesses. The site would likely be more responsive than some dynamically loaded javascript bloat just to show a few pictures and bit of text. It would also be maintainable by anyone, forever. No framework updates or APIs to learn.

It would be so simple you could even teach the business owner how to do basic updates, like changing the listed prices on the menu or changing the description of a dish. Sure, you don't get to charge them for these changes, but they'll be delighted they don't have to worry about paying a consultant's minimum fee just to update their menu.

View on HN

This is exactly what I'm doing right now. Small businesses are being thrown HTML files and told to figure it out, it's crazy.

So I do the opposite and take care of everything. Design, build, deploy, maintain and update. I'm not a designer, but I take cues from their logos, menu, etc. I run it in the nearest AWS region for low latency, optimize all the assets, http2, etc. I strive to follow every best practice, within reason.

For a craft beer pub[0], I pull their current beers on tap from the Untappd![1] API, so the beers are always up to date. I also made a beautiful responsive menu that works great on mobile, tablet and desktop.

Where I'm really lacking is in self promotion. I do great work, but putting myself out there and selling myself is difficult. I will get there, though!

I'm doing this all to land a job doing front-end web dev somewhere I can grow my skills more. I came to programming late, but it is my passion.

Any thoughts on my site[2] would be much appreciated.

[0] https://tangentcafe.ca

[1] https://untapped.com

[2] https://jeremypoole.ca

Edit: formatting

I think this is a great angle to take. Small businesses don't care at all about modern web development, and I think sites like this best suite their needs. Keep it up :)

Good on you for doing this. I too build what people need, not just stuff the industry says I should. You're doing good work if you're giving people what they need.

My latest project involved actually building a Wordpress site but in such a way that someone with no coding/html/css ability can alter it in a virtually unlimited variety of ways to build what he needs.

I actually built the site for the operator, not the business. And in turn that's already having positive impacts on the business as they can react and create things they need quickly.

Some parts I wrote myself but sure I hacked parts of it together with theme builders and plugins. Lambast me all you like but those were right for him as he had ownership/understanding of what they did for him rather than some unintelligible code. And that's what matters sometimes!

How do you get the business to agree to your design?

I would love to do something like this but when I used to try I always ran into the same problem.

The business owner would rather me follow the poor design choices of their competitors (hard to read text, bloated, random pop ups, etc). I always did it for them but it really killed me inside.

Your site looks great, I like the way you explain your services.

You might want to check your "blog" link at the bottom though. Gives me a 404.

On [0], it takes ages for one of the 3 categories to get folded back. I actually thought they can only unfold and are not supposed to fold back.

Nice job. Looks like "untapped.com" may have some issues at the moment though.

Your sites may have gotten hugged a little too hard...

The problem is that small businesses either don't have the money to pay for a quality static site or don't want to. If you want to get into this industry as a dev you're competing against sweatshops that shit out these garbage websites in 2 days for $200 apiece. They're not optimising for easy-to-use tooling or a quality end product, they're optimising for stuff they can copy/paste as quick as possible. Back in the day when I was learning HTML/CSS, that meant a bunch of shit jQuery plugins. Today I imagine it's React components or something.

Not contradicting you directly -- but many small businesses also value the personal impressions and trust a lot more, and many of them have been burned by those sweatshops.

I think the tide is gradually turning and many small business owners would prefer to buy you a dinner and have a good chat with you and if they like you then they'll give you business, albeit small (though you can do 10 of these without much trouble if you optimize your own process).

There is a market niche for practical no-BS small website builders these days, IMO.

Sounds simple in theory, but try it. What people need is vastly different from what they want.

It's a sea of people who want complexity for $100. They just go to fiverr and get someone to throw together hacky shit templates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com