> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper.
I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary.
Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money.
You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.
Wordpress is kind of forever. I was helping someone with a decade-old managed wordpress a little while ago; it required updating plugins and ditching a few of the old ones, but otherwise a relatively simple process.
> But no one will find it.
The spam problem. This destroyed USENET, and has now destroyed blogs. People retreat to the half-dozen sites that have half-effective spam fighting. Twitter has abandoned spam fighting and is slowly sinking as a result.
I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary.
Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money.
You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.