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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Really nice, focused write up. Very useful and to the point.

HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer skills. It's a shame that a standard business website is now a facebook page.

There is a local gym near me with a static HTML webpage, hosted on local ISP web hosting. It's quick to load, responsive and always up to date. Checking the opening times, address and special events is much easier than on some aggregator site or google maps (which is often out of date). It's also very easy to read on many devices.

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I absolutely hate this ' let's just put it on Facebook'. My wife was planning to go to this boutique kids shoe shop. Checked the opening hours,etc. Went there just to see the shop closed. Calls the owner, and she's all surprised: oh but I did post on Facebook that I'll be open from 2pm..

I do as well but let's be honest, many people who create sites for money will not necessarily coach the business to keep it simple, since they will earn less money from it.

By the time you add a CMS (to help the business not screw up the markup), some design help and all the features that the business thinks are easy because "it is just a form", and you are paying several thousand dollars, way more than many small business think is worth it.

The other alternative, I guess, is something like Shopify but many people I have talked to struggle to see why paying a monthly subscription is money well-spent to get something always up to date and fresh. They'll pay a shop assistant pittance which is still more than they would need to pay for Shopping-as-a-service and get less value.

Unfortunately, businesses have to go to where the customers are. Many customers now are 100% Facebook-era, particularly true of the young and those older folk late to computing, and it might not occur to them to check https://www.widgetsRus.com before searching for Widgets R Us on Facebook.

Updating a 'personal' site is also a PITA IF you don't know what you are doing or don't have a streamlined process, e.g. for me I'd just amend the .htm page to say I'm shut from 2pm and FTP it up, 2 minutes, but someone non-savvy will always prefer to post a new message on FB saying 'hey, shutting at 2pm today', takes even less time and less cognitive load.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way. But it's understandable.

EDIT: Not to mention, updating a site on the move is difficult. Pull latest version of site (Github), amend .htm (some notepad app?), then an FTP client on the phone, log in, find, push the file, close, check. Versus opening the FB app and doing some typing.

If we actually got the semantic web that was promised, back in the burgeoning xhtml days, then it seems like Facebook / own website could simply duplicate the latest data from the other page.

There's a nifty tool called Bridgy that helps with this--it's out of the IndieWeb community with their POSSE model: Post on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere

https://brid.gy/

Is there a technical reason you’re only using three letter extensions for HTML files?

The 8.3 filename structure has a long half-life.

I guess related to Windows file extension in the past. 3 letters only.

8.3 is CP/M or maybe earlier even, I guess?

> Pull latest version of site (Github)

What does that have to do with personal site vs Facebook? If Github is a problem, don't use Github if you regularly need to update and for some reason you can't do it using the web editor. I mean, WordPress is kind of a big deal.

There's nothing wrong with Facebook if you like a kind of ugly website that randomly pops up crap to prevent people from viewing your site. If you're concerned about people that only use Facebook and no other sites, you can duplicate material on Facebook.

Of all businesses a boutique kids shoe shop is sure to attract the Facebook crowd as it exists today in the West at least

I have no doub it does, but checking a business' Facebook account to see if they are open would probably be the last thing I could come up with.

I've had this happen too at Armageddon Shop in Cambridge. When I showed up, the two employees told me to leave because they posted on Facebook that they were closing two hours early due to nobody showing up

I don't even use Facebook, and if I did, I wouldn't check every place I wanted to go on it before I went there

When discussing points such as yours, I always bring up https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (which I like very much), http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ (which I like less) and https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ (which I like more than the second, but still less than the first). There is also https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ but I do not remember where it fits chronologically.

There are so many, so many sites that would be perfect with just basic HTML and maybe some CSS

Ironically, all of those (except https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/) try to pull in some kind of Analytics JS, which kind of defeats their point...

One of them even pull in jQuery...

2 out of 4 have analytics (not "all of those (except [the last one]"), and none of them use jQuery.

- https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ => GA

- http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ => GA

- https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ => Plausible + jQuery

- https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ => No JS included

So 3/4 have analytics, + one with jQuery.

Tested by looking at requests made in the network inspector of the browser developer tools.

And the jQuery it pulls isn't even gzipped or otherwise encoded! Although at least it's minified.

Does anyone have a day-to-day use blog/site that passes all the tests like this?

I've heard news.ycombinator.com is pretty great when it comes to good readability, UX and being lightweight :)

> - https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ => GA

You're right. My adblocker blocked it, so I didn't spot it. What I said about jQuery, however, is still true.

> - https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ => Plausible + jQuery

Wrong—this one doesn't use jQuery, and none of the others do, either.

Yeah, you're right about jQuery. I got fooled because the page is loading the following URL:

> https://thebestmotherfucking.website/js/jquery-3.5.1.min.js

But the response to that request is not an actual copy of jQuery, which it seems when you just look at the URL, but the following body instead:

    /* NO, really, NOBODY NEEDS TO INCLUDE A FUCKING FRAMEWORK TO MAKE A COOL WEBSITE. */
    console.log("Don't worry, no jQuery was used in this website.");
    var $ = function () { $.fancyRainbow = $; $.html = $; return $ }

I got fooled by it, should have verified it was actually jQuery I guess. Now the other comment about jQuery (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33020599) kind of makes sense, almost.

Ah, interesting. I nevera actually started DevTools on them but yes - they betrayed my trust :)

>HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer skills. It's a shame that a standard business website is now a facebook page.

It really is a shame. HTML and CSS are among the easiest ways of experiencing for yourself the power and possibilities of ordering a computer to do things for you.

CSS easy? I've been writing code since the 80s, and CSS is one of the most confounding things I've encountered.

Easy things are easy in CSS. Hard things are... possible. Sometimes barely so. Sometimes impossible without JS. BUT, the easy things are generally easy.

In job interviews, I've been handed code in various languages from assembly to C to Java and asked to figure out what that code does. It can be an interesting challenge, and while I'm certainly not the fastest to figure it out, I usually can.

Give me a bunch of CSS and ask me what it will do... even with the docs in front of me, I am almost certain to get much of it wrong. And I suspect even experienced front end devs (I've never done front end professionally) would struggle with such a challenge.

A subset of CSS is very easy. The rest of it is a complete mess.

> HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer skills

While I think this is a bit of a stretch I think the really inaccessible part of it is knowing how to host and deploy it.

It takes time to establish discoverability with a website, you either rely on a search engine, word of mouth, business cards, etc. A new small-business website won't magically start generating traffic without some significant effort.

Using a platform like Facebook or Google Maps makes it easier to for other people to find your page when they want to look for it.

True, but a local gym doesn't need global discovery and SEO optimization. They can just put the URL on their business cards, and in a few places at reception. A sticker on their door. 95% of their customers will see it and know where to go.

you can just point the facebook page and google to your website. problem solved.

The problem with coding up a custom website for myself is I end up wanting to customize it to no end. It distracts me from actually writing. Add in a dose of graphic design ideas and very few words go down at all.

I just finished replacing my custom site with a ghost site using a theme that is barely customizable at all. Hopefully, this will make it easier to avoid fiddling with it.

The new site is more generic unfortunately, but on the plus side, I already have almost 20k words queued up for future posts

Let’s say you’re a business owner, don’t have many technical skills, and want to change opening hours for a given day (e.g. public holiday). You’ll have to go at least 5 extra steps that require you to achieve that, than just pulling up your phone, going on your facebook page and changing the hours.

I think we are collectively over estimating average public’s willingness to go extra steps to achieve almost the same results that most of the public already expects.

Engineers tend to think of things like this to be easy. A typical small restaurant owner is probably also a chef/cook of some kind. Their view of the internet might be internet==facebook and they probably think how to properly flavor something is easy. Contrast that where I have to go look up 5 recipe websites, watch some youtube to really grok it and then will forget after a day or so unless I wrote it down and will end up doing the same thing all over next time I cook that dish.

I wanted to ask for a link, then I thought the server on the local ISP might not have the resources to withstand HN traffic, then I thought such a small efficient website wouldn't require many resources!

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