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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

I fully reject the whole “the website isn’t art”, “the website isn’t about you”. That fees so myopic. A website is part of developing a brand identity. It is about expressing your values, while also providing information/a service (assuming we talk about companies). Art is about communicating feelings, emotions, a message, there is a clear overlap with a brand identity here

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Agree. Show people your vision. Make them understand it the way you see it. Otherwise you're publishing the same ineffective pablum we see everywhere.

Exactly! This whole sentiment reminds me of the Jobs quote "people don't know what they want until you show it to them".

But that isn’t the point at all.

For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.

Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot

This is how your company goes broke. There was a company, Amie, that had this [0] as their landing page initially, without the /art path. Guess what, visitors didn't convert, and then the company redid their landing page [1] to actually explain and convert customers. They literally host their prior landing page as "art" because it was so terrible at acquiring customers.

[0] https://amie.so/art

[1] https://amie.so

They had a "normal" page before the art one for the longest time according to my memory but confirmed by web archive.

Also: the current website is for a different product altogether. They pivoted.

Attributing low conversion rate to the style of the page isn't really fair when it was apparently a last attempt at attracting customers for an idea that was eventually abandoned.

Agreed. As someone who has been in charge of business websites of for both Mag7 websites and for Silicon Valley startups, there can be a productive disagreement about what exactly user needs are. As well as how to balance business conversion / sales metrics vs the larger ability to communicate brand identity.

Meanwhile, my personal website pretty much only serves my own idiosyncratic interests!

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