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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> When did having a website become something exclusively for old people?

It's more that having a website never became a thing for many businesses in the first place. 30 years ago they might have had a listing in the phone book. Nowadays that kind of business might have a facebook page, or more recently an instagram account. Creating a website (even with something like wix) requires a level of skill and effort above that.

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Idk how something like a cafe would necessarily benefit the business to have a dedicated website. A facebook (or google maps) page presents relevant info such as location/hours/menu in a predefined schema, so neither the owner or the customer need to worry about formatting it (or understanding the format).

They're just being cheap. Facebook is free (and "everybody has Facebook") whereas Wix and Squarespace are $12-$15/mo for businesses.

For a lot of businesses, a website receives way fewer views than any one of their top-3 social media sites.

I’ve seen a lot who are still paying for a site but rarely bother to update it. All the traffic’s on Facebook.

It is not just 15$ a month. You need to pay someone to develop the website in the first place and then deal with all kinds of issues that eventually arise (updating the underlying framework and/or getting hacked and dealing with the consequences, solving random stuff like expired SSL certificate, etc.).

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