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> 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.

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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.

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.

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

> 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.

I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052

I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather have had a real job, even if it was to build something he didn't fully agree with)

Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone.

It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.

It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).

Correct.

The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.

Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?

So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.

That’s less time teaching and innovating.

Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.

Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.

My company won’t backfill product management in timely fashion.

Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.

Yeah, the bit where there are 10x as many administrators in higher education, but professors now all have to do their own admin, always drove me up the wall

That is more money for the baseball team

All of the demos of booking travel using AI are hilarious to me. This used to be a job a travel agent did, and planning a trip was either a fun conversation or you could be like "send me somewhere warm" and let them do it.

Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!

> Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!

And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.

Just buy insurance! Oh, it's up to you to understand what it actually covers, and it's about as much as the room/flight costs but won't you feel better about your choice?

Similar example in the grocery stores with the self checkout. In the past if the employee did a scanning mistake, worst case the manager / customer would be mad.

Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.

Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants

Well, even without exaggeration - if the employee made a scanning mistake, most of the time they (or the customer) would notice during or immediately afterwards, so the employee would just hit undo or scan a negative or such, and carry on.

No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.

Some times I'm curious to see how stores work at the US nowadays.

My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).

Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.

Between Costco/Target/Winco/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Kroger/Uniqlo, my experience is that I can check out quicker than before. I rarely have to wait for assistance, which itself is rarely needed.

I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.

For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.

Do they ever actually analyze the situation? In my experience they just ignore any issues and hit "approve" and on you go. I could have done that myself.

It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.

I'm sure plenty of things get by them this way.

> Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.

If this happens, it’s a problem with the judicial system, not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened, though.

What did travel agents do when they made a mistake? I don’t think they reimbursed people?

They were in a position to notice and correct most mistakes near-immediately, or at least shortly after making it. For most other cases, apologies and/or reimbursements backed by insurance if needed, transparent to the customer. In self-service, all that is responsibility of the user, but it's all built on requests to third parties, so the user is not in a position to unilaterally fix a bad request.

The travel agent is also not in a position to "unilaterally" fix a bad request, they are also requesting other parties to do things.

Travel agents were not outlawed. Most people just prefer to save money and do the work themselves (for most trips) rather than pay a travel agent.

> The travel agent is also not in a position to "unilaterally" fix a bad request, they are also requesting other parties to do things.

Yes, but they're already one level up, so they can fix the problems in their company's immediate system, and then unlike the customer, they're a trusted party in the network of all other parties, so they can mail/call other parties directly and get people there to fix issues without too much delay.

There's multiple levels missing when you do it yourself. Usually they would do their best to sort things out. At the very least it was a single call to deal with the issue to someone who knew how to rebook flights, find new hotels, whatever, not you struggling to figure things out on your phone. For a full mistake, yes, they'd usually reimburse you, if not there are regulations around refunds and things like small claims court.

Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.

>Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.

90% of travel is probably happening where mobile networks are available. Also, since most travel seems to happen without travel agents today, it appears that "luck" is not that necessary, otherwise people wouldn't be choosing to forego travel agents.

> And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.

And you can enjoy overpaying for a lower quality vacation if your travel agent is unscrupulous and getting kickbacks from vendors.

That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.

Those that don’t want to are still free to pay extra for a travel agent.

> That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.

Only if your time is worthless.

So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.

By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.

Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that up.

Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.

"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading.

Otherwise, totally agree.

Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.

Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.

When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.

Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.

> Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.

This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table.

I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above.

>Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.

I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.

When you purchase something from a company you are buying the commodity not the labor used in its making. A commodity has many costs wrapped into it, including labor. The profit a commodity brings to a company doesn't have a 1-1 relationship with the wage of a laborer, so a consumer buying a coffee isn't buying the labor of someone else, they are buying a product. "Buying human labor" means you are an employer paying a wage or rate. Generally employers are people or entities that have accumulated wealth through profit. It's fair to say these people skew towards wealthy, hardly a silly statement at all.

Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot on priority and values. I value spending time with my family and I will often trade money for time to enable that.

Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.

Agreed to be fair, the saying better pertains to time-poor people but I didn't want to misrepresent the original idiom.

I can see that when reading it back, I'll keep it in mind.

Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?

Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.

>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?

Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.

With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.

Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)

Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant. So even if you get just half of the people to book online, that's still a great improvement.

And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.

>Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant.

What makes you think old school restaurants care about that levels of efficiency and optimisations? If they did, they'd all optimize everything till they all become become mcdonalds.

It's in the part you quoted: They don't want to be interrupted by phone calls while they are working. Because they are very busy with other stuff. People working in restaurants are always on their feet doing something.

Taking online orders helps them ease a bit of a burden without having any negative effect for the customer experience.

Someone from the staff still needs to regularly check and apply the online booking or cancellations because waiters are not autonomous robots where the booking system beams the info their brain(yet). It doesn't remove any friction you're just replacing interrupt driven phone calls with the internet driven polling and calling this radical innovation.

I've worked for some years in restaurants. Guess what everybody hates? Having their work interrupted by phone calls.

Would you like to have your work interrupted all the time by phone calls?

Today I consult for restaurants and help them get their web presence and the reservation systems they need on their websites. They are very happy for this.

A restaurant usually has their booking calendar open on a display that all the chefs and waiters can check when they walk by. The system doesn't need any human to "apply" reservations or cancellations.

And there is a big difference between being interrupted to take bookings, or checking bookings when you have down-time. But thank you for your hacker sarcasm.

Guests usually call during the day to book tables for the evening or for another evening. In the afternoon between lunch and dinner, there is more time for staff to check bookings. Instead of answering the phone in the middle of morning prep or lunch service.

Then there's events. A venue can have public events with hundreds or thousands of participants. Usually during high season. So now you'd have that additional burden of phone calls, which becomes completely impossible unless you hire additional staff to only take calls. Or you have your own online system which is available 24/7 for customers to make and even pay for their bookings.

Third party reservation systems take anything from 15%-25% to do it for you, which is not really great for the restaurant, compared to buying their own system.

Or if it's an online system for take-away orders or deliveries, these get sent directly to the kitchen ticket printer.

And it's the same for the other small business category: accommodation. The best thing they can do is have their own online booking systems. To increase sales, reduce burden on staff, and reduce expenses to third party providers. And give customers a better experience.

Ordering apps handle that nowadays, it seems routine for restaurants have have multiple apps on multiple devices as their intake.

You're only seeing this in the perspective of a customer. Ordering apps take a huge chunk of the tiny margin restaurants have. Smart owners put up their own ordering system instead.

Table reservations are only for fancy restsurants.

And non-fancy restaurants have take-away orders or delivery orders, which also benefit from online bookings.

> Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites?

They already do.

e.g. our landscaper's website is something like:

bobslandscaping.landscaper.com

It handles the invoices and hosts his basic contact information etc. Sounds like a great business to be in to be the hosting company for this.

From what I've observed in different parts of the world, small restaurants, hair salons, beauty salons, boutiques, etc. all go straight to Facebook/Instagram. Opening hours and driving directions are already there, menus/offers are in the gallery - together with pictures of the meals or whatever they are selling. Contact forms are replaced with a WhatsApp number. Testimonials are the customers comments. If there are negative ones, either respond for bonus points or just outright delete them.

Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.

I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

That, and giving something nice to your local community ----- the place where you belong.

Like, if I have a skill, why shouldn't I use that skill in service of those around me? Especially when it's barely an inconvenience for me.

The western culture of individualism runs contrary to our biology.

Good question, I do such things because 1) web design is full of con artists 2) there is no money in restaurants, it is a horrible sector to be. I want as much of the business expenses on my plate. 3) I want a simple snappy website with a phone number, what time they are open and the menu. 4) I can do this in less than 10 minutes. 5) I love to code specially if the project isn't complicated. 6) It is hilarious to look at once every 3rd month. Some leave it in sterile perfection, some turn it into a geocities/myspace page, some go crazy with youtube videos. 7) I've never seen downtime, no one ever calls.

> Should their accountant work for free also?

If they did, do you think they get good service? Would they be allowed to pay for their food/drinks?

> And their waiters and kitchen staff?

Thats hard work man. Shit pay too usually. Ill fill it under almost free.

And in our day jobs we earn money for providing negative value to society. Least we can do is give a little something to someone everynow and then.

Firstly, I think you missed that they are small business-owners and simply do not have the time to manage this. Even if I volunteered to do charity work for a local business, they would still need to spend the time to get onto the old developer to transfer domain access, host access, billing info, etc.

Secondly, I no longer work near there and haven't gone to that cafe in about 5 years. I keep up with old colleagues who say the cafe is doing well, but now if I had taken on that work now I'm their contact.

Lastly, this is all ignoring the maintenance cost. What version of PHP? What version of Apache/NGINX/Traefik? Any security vulnerability in Ubuntu in the past half decade? Now we have to play the security cat & mouse game.

At the end of the day, while I don't want to go to Instagram/Facebook to find menus/opening hours, the truth is that it is significantly easier for the average person to just make a social media post.

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.

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.

IG is only for the regular customers.

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.

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.

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.

It's a trend in Sri Lanka for some reason to put your menu on Instagram... as a reel. Because you don't want your customers to have more than 15 seconds to view what you serve.

People put that stuff up on Google maps, Facebook, and Instagram now.

I know it’s not popular with the crowd here, but those platforms are free, easy to use, and where the customers are. The mainstream options for a website like squarespace are absurdly expensive.

Yes and no. I find the restaurant on Google maps but 9/10 times the menu is either outdated or not properly structured and having a link to the menu website is better. So Google maps is the top of the funnel but I still appreciate a website.

Really the previous comment should have mentioned Yelp, and perhaps Tripadvisor for non-American customers.

For many local places here, the only way to get the menu online is if a customer posted a photo of the menu on Google maps or something.

And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.

I can’t help but think what this means is just that the menu isn’t that’s important as a marketing tool. If having an up to date website and menu resulted in a noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have it.

Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.

Or it’s good for customers and bad for restaurants. There are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics, and you can avoid most of them just looking on their menu.

Maybe that is the case for some places, but this is rather rural Germany. Not sure when I've last seen a tourist here.

Yeah that context matters significantly. What’s the turnover rate for restaurants in your area? What’s the variance in menu? “Success” in my neck of the woods is staying open more than 2 years, and menu availability plays a significant role.

We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!

Is that a "restaurant" then? Your use case means a kitchen which indeed needs a menu. But dining is something else, so we cannot compare.

Many of them offer that option, so there is a grey zone. But you're right - should have been more clear about that.

You are moving the goalposts, subtly.

The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.

The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.

I think it's important for customers and they usuallly post the menu in google maps thing, basically the customers are doing the labor of the business owner and the business owner as he still gets the results he doesn't do it

What makes you think that the menu in the website is not going to be outdated.

I think the parent is making the assumption that a business owner would be able (and willing) to update the menu on their own website, whereas random pictures on Google Maps/Instagram might not have the most recent menu.

Google maps makes sense at least, but you're straight losing money if all you have is an instagram page. I can't tell if the facebook mention is a joke or not.

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.

It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:

"Can you tell me if the food is good?"

"Can you tell me are the staff great?"

"Can you tell me what does it cost?"

and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.

People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.

You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.

If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.

No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.

> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.

Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.

> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"

> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"

> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"

> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.

A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.

Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.

I imagine location matters even more? A well placed restaurant with adequate food probably does good business, still?

Sure is. I was contrasting 'merits' of being listed at aggregator sites vs. having ones own website.

I directionally agree with this but, what do you do in three months when you change to the summer menu?

Take a picture of the menu, send through ChatGPT, read it over for mistakes, paste content into your website.

How do you "paste content into your website"? Did somebody build them a CMS?

The same way they built the website the first time.

Most people should put in a Google maps entry

Your menu? Can't. Your open hours? They already know it.

You can put your menu on Google maps, we did it for our restaurant. https://maps.app.goo.gl/YdbSHd7hewkXQeMz8 see "menu" tab

To be fair the Google maps restaurant side of the operation is quite possibly the largest ratio I've ever seen between "amount of capital and engineering skill available" and "quality (lack thereof) of UX." You have to access your restaurant profile through the Google search portal. It's a nightmare.

That's one way to do it. The links are broken though.

The words you're looking for are, "Oh! My mistake. Sorry." Or, "Thanks! I stand corrected."

I followed the links and got www.thejispot.com’s server IP address could not be found.

Yes, we used to have a website: https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot

The restaurant is closed now, permanently.

You can see we updated it fairly regularly https://github.com/508-dev/thejispot/commits/main/

The issue is priorities.

If you have long list of todos for a restaurant, why put building a website in the top 10?

I specifically tracked this problem and built https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of social media.

Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.

Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.

Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.

"lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.

Thanks. I am definitely injecting too much nerd. I just couldn't help myself. I do have alternate urls available but point taken. I should probably redo the branding.

IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's builder, they should make a stronger showcase.

The examples look fine to me.

Potential customers want to see the menu (or product range or similar), location, a couple of pictures. It's supposed to give useful and necessary information. The intended purpose is:

Before: your cafe does not have a website.

After: your cafe has a simple website where people can see the menu, hours, and location.

This tool accomplishes that, and looks fine.

It's not supposed to give the viewer an aesthetic experience so novel and surprising, subverting the entire paradigm of cafe menus, to leave the viewer questioning reality and rethinking their entire approach to life.

Why use this tool that looks vibe coded when you can also use wix (which sadly also looks vibe coded nowadays)?

I appreciate everyone’s feedback, but it wasn’t “vibe-coded”. I’ve been in software over ten years and am targeting non-technical users.

I’m aiming for a mix of dazzle and simplicity.

Wix is at least $10 more per month. The intention is to keep the price low without making it impossible to afford to operate on a smaller scale.

Many small businesses have nothing approaching what tech businesses consider a low budget.

If your product works as described, I think it would be great for a lot of small businesses. The only problem is that your potential customers don't know about it, and there's no easy way to discover it.

I noticed users in the United States can't sign up. ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18. Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow uptake.

Yes, my primary concern is serving the Canadian market at present.

I wouldn't have the highest confidence in the results if I open up the homepage and my fans rev up tbh.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I’ve tested it personally out on some real clunkers. Maybe the animations on the landing page don’t play nice with every browser… Hard to know without more details, but I guess I appreciate you checking it out either way.

It doesn't look like they're "trying to say" anything. They said it.

They opened the homepage and heard and/or felt their fans rev up, which didn't leave a good impression. They don't have confidence that your product/service is worth paying for (perhaps not worth using even if it were free).

There's nothing else to figure out.

Yes, it's the animations. They're very intensive in general but especially the ones that AI-generated sites like to use to get around the basic attempts to block them. I was admittedly a bit hostile because the frequency, intensity, and hiddenness of animations is becoming an increasing aggravation across the web, and more and more frequently they're disregarding my OS/browser settings to disable animations.

My first reaction was that it was visually intimidating for a non-computer person. I went through the workflow of the demo and it was pretty easy, but I suspect most people wouldn't make it that far.

Appreciate the feedback. Would you mind highlighting anything in particular? I can take it. My main efforts went into the platform. I admittedly stumbled through the landing pages. Wasn’t sure how far to take it. Most of my designs end up rather simple but I was concerned it wouldn’t attract people. Its terrible if its having the opposite effect lol

Clutter.

Restaurants generally have low margins. What brand recognition do social media platforms have with an average person? How much does it cost a restaurant to list themselves on social media? That's your competition, widely-known and free.

You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.

Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.

Yeah, you could even just serve a pdf at the root path, that wouldn't even require any HTML.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, he's non-technical. He hasn't written a line of code. I don't know the details of how he hosts or deploys the sites, but I'd likely guarantee that he asked whatever AI he uses and it just walked him through the process of getting one hosted, then he has replicated that.

I mean, for a 12 year old, $200 and not having to do any more work in the future might be a good deal, and for a business, a $200 one-time probably seems like a steal. I agree that there might be long-term issues for them if they don't know how to maintain them, but what are they going to do, sue the 12 year old?

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).

Literally perfectly relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Brilliant hahaha

> 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.

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)

>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.

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.

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.

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?"

Just ask ChatGPT for that too, it'll happily walk you through standing up Unity or whatever.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ridiculously expensive. The cost of hosting a mom-and-pop website is close to zero, and they charge $20/month or something like that.

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.

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.

> 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.

To think about this from another angle, imagine yourself as a worker selling your labor in exchange for money. Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim in cash, or would you take as much your company is willing to pay you to work there? If your answer is no, then why should a company selling a product act any differently?

If squarespace following free market 101 upsets you so much, maybe you should start a squarespace competitor and charge whatever you think is a fair price. If what you said is true then you should be able to undercut squarespace by a huge margin and still make a profit. Give it a try and tell us how it goes.

> Would you voluntarily negotiate a pay cut just because you can charge a fraction of what you do and still swim in cash

You're posing the question like there's an obvious answer, and that that answer is "no". In reality, all kinds of people do this all the time.

> Yeah, like I said, it costs close to $0.

> 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.

This is the classic sentiment by which one can tell that the person has no idea how businesses/markets work.[1]

The only relationship between the cost and the price is that the former is a floor for the latter. The price is determined by the value it brings to the one paying for it. If it is less than the cost to build, you don't have a business. If it's 1000x the cost to build, then you charge 1000x. Why would you charge less?

If the cost was so close to $0, and they charge $20/month, all that means is that there's an opening for you to set up the same business and charge, say, $15/mo.

I thought SS charged a lot more. Frankly, $20/mo is a steal. If a restaurant can't afford to pay $20/mo to acquire customers, they're not in good shape at all.

[1] I used to be that guy.

I think you're thinking marginal costs. Only charging for marginal costs will put you out of business almost immediately. There are plenty of non-marginal costs that need to be covered, which will make it "not close to $0".

If you think I'm talking nonsense, make sure you know what the term actually means: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginalcostofproductio... There's a common misuse (unless it has become so common that it's just another definition, if you're a descriptivist grammarian) to use it to mean "small, negligible", but I'm using it in the real business/accounting sense. Of all the industries, tech is among the worst in terms of being unable to charge based on marginal costs; so often our marginal costs are effectively $0 but the fixed costs of what we have are millions to billions of dollars.

It's not ridiculously expensive. It's ridiculously cheap. $20 per month is nothing for a small business to spend on something that solves a problem.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Neocities is picking up the slack: https://neocities.org/

God damn those featured pages load so fast.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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

Reminds me a little of something I wrote once:

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/

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

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?

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.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but shouldn't free Internet access come before that?

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.

Internet access doesn't seem to be an issue.

Politics is also about making practical choices to advance humanity.

> 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.

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.

Forgive me for assuming that the government owned service would be more transparent/serve the people better than a privately owned, closed source, platform that's explicitly funded by ads and so is transparently corrupt. Even your worst case scenario for this would be equivalent to what we already have.

> Your assuming the local government employed webmaster won't favor his friends restaurants.

Oh my! Mic drop! You got me! Corporate owned sites would have to be unbiased, right? It's not like a business would ever do something as disreputable favoring a restaurant that paid for the favored treatment, or try to steer you to affiliated businesses. Inconceivable!

But seriously now: a government-run site would be way better and have less biases. In the US, there's a good chance it'd be run by civically-minded people, and there's about zero chance that conflict of interest would be baked into its "business" model.

Trump would be running that right now if it existed.

Converted to dollars, the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me, so I don't need to justify it until someone can justify to me the bombs, the oil and gas subsidies, the bailouts, the...

>the value is far greater than the cost of a single bomb dropped on strangers that aren't a threat to me

Such a weird comparison. Just so we are tuned in, can you list some things that are of less value to you than a single bomb on a stranger?

My point is I don't want bombs dropped on strangers, so, in terms of things the government spends money on, there's nothing of less value to me that a single bomb on a stranger. Of all things the government spends its money on, I'd rather any one of those things to take 100% of the budget, than even a penny to go to dropping a bomb on a stranger, even if that significantly decreases my quality of life.

I just really don't like my government killing people far away that pose no threat to me.

Reading back through my comments, I recognize that omitting the quotes around “free services” would have made my comment here more palatable, and less provocative. That was poor form on my part.

Back in the day, there was this thing called the "Yellow Pages"! :-)

I believe the yellow pages were typically printed by private companies, often the telephone companies, so in a way Facebook is an apt comparison!

Did you need an account to read the Yellow Pages?

No, you received piles of them on your doorstep whether you liked it or not.

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)

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.

Ah, fair enough

And security

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

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.

> 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/

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.

Or delete old photos because their phone is slow. Techies really overestimate the correctness of the mental models non-techies walk around with.

closer to 99.9%

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.

after

>will take your credit card

I expected you will go on with a joke how they will get scammed out of their money.

But then you went on and it made me think: people in question also trust these big name platforms. If they have just enough grit to try something on their own, they have, usually, enough of healthy view on themselves to know that they aren't sure how can they make this safely.

Also lost 1/3 of developers who have no interest in self-hosting on the open net.

For a normal person, the only real words in this sentence are "get", "with", and "image", but the last one does not mean what they would think it means.

Even WIX needs some level of tech savviness, usually beyond 90% small business owners. And Instagram? Well, one of the main points of having a restaurant is to tell your friends about it, so the Instagram profile is more important than actually having a real restaurant.

How are you going to convince your ie hair salon? Being cheeky but I imagine the conversation is going to go like:

- "What the heck is a domain name"

- "What the heck is a vps"

Probably going to doze off by the time you get to explaining an http server.

Don't get me started on the "plain text file". A website that looks like notepad.exe from '95?

It's worse than not sexy, most users would think the website got hacked or something. And I'm not teaching my hair stylist CSS

How do I get a domain name? What is a VPS? What the hell is nginx? How do I write a plain text file in Word? I don't have time for this ...

That's why Squarespace and Wix exist. You have 30 minutes.

> How do I write a plain text file in Word?

In college I was a TA a course that (among other things) was the first place students would usually encounter C and the CLI. To standardize how things were compiled and run, we would test everything from the assignments on the school's Linux server that everyone had ssh access to. In order to teach the students how to connect to and use it, we'd have a seminar going over the basics of the Unix shell, sshing, text editing, etc. Because every year there would inevitably be some students who got confused about the idea that Word wasn't a text editor, I started demoing during the seminar opening Word, saving a .docx file (the default by the time I was doing this), and then changing the extension to .zip and double clicking it to show that it was full of XML files under the hood.

I'm not sure whether it was fully clear how that worked to all of them, but it did at least seem to cut down on the number of students in office hours who were trying to write their C code in Word, maybe just because they remembered "oh that's the TA who was really adamant that I don't use Word for this".

And for the gap between that person and you there is another person talking shit about you and your gap between them

Realistically, most people don't have the expertise of setting up HTTPS enabled web hosting on nginx (maybe Caddy will be easier.) There is just so much prerequisite knowledge for a non technical person to know. What they do instead is either

- Pay for a shared hosting plan on one of the big players like Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostinger.

- Install wordpress in one click

- Do everything in Wordpress.

- Pray that no one ever hacks their Wordpress installation

- Pay for an agency

- Have an IT professional — like you and me — make the website, and put a link in the website footer saying "website designed by XYZ Inc."

Agree.

From my personal experience I'd add a lot Director/Sr Director in relatively technical companies who manage scores of web application developers. So when you say most, it could literally be almost everyone.

The VPS should just be their home router, and then have the ISP provide the domain name.

Uploading the web site could be a discovered Samba or NFS share.

Hopefully IPv6 can make self hosting viable again.

That's not realistic for non-developers.

However, anybody can easily get a website: Just send an e-mail or make a call to any of the myriad web design people in your local area.

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