Why People Don’t Make Websites?

Because we can’t solve a problem we don’t understand.

How It Used To Be

I remember when relatively ordinary people had their own websites, back in the middle of the 1990s. These weren’t people who made their livings by breaking their brains until they could think roughly like a computer did. They were teachers, artists, musicians, college students like me, and even younger kids.

We learned from books we found at the library. We learned from each other. We learned early on that browsers would let you see the code that made a web page, that “view source” was the Web’s answer to the “reveal codes” function in WordPerfect. We reveled in the power browsers gave us. If we didn’t know how to make a page look a certain way, we’d surf until we found a page that looked mostly like what we had in mind, view source, copy, paste, and tweak.

We made a lot of ugly, janky pages and websites but we were having too much fun to care. Besides, nobody was paying most of us to care. But once people started trying to make money off of websites instead of being content to sell browsers, access, or hosting — things changed.

How Did It Go Wrong?

Amy Hoy at Stacking the Bricks argues that blogs broke the web. According to her, once people got used to writing diary entries using a web application instead of building quirky homepages and online libraries, they no longer wanted to go back to writing their own HTML.

This might have been OK if they could instead customize CMS templates. However, customizing the templates provided by tools like Moveable Type, Blogger, LiveJournal, and WordPress was and remains a lot harder than hacking together raw HTML.

Is HTML really that bad?

I never thought so. Raw HTML is a very forgiving medium.

CSS is pretty forgiving, too.

Browsers will take anything you throw at them. They will do the best they can to render your markup and stylesheets. The result might not be quite what you had in mind, but it won't balk and throw an error message in your face.

What's Wrong With CMS Templates?

There's nothing wrong with a CMS template like a WordPress theme that isn't also wrong with a CMS like WordPress. A CMS makes certain common operations like creating pages or new blog posts more convenient at the expense of making everything else more complex. For example, instead of styling a WordPress site yourself, you'd use a set of templates called a “theme”. Instead of building the site locally and then uploading it to a directory on your host's server, you connect to a web app running on a server that stashes everything within its database. As one might imagine, all sorts of things can go wrong here, but let's focus on themes and templates.

Is it really that much harder to make a WordPress theme than to build a website from scratch? I think so. HTML isn’t enough. CSS isn’t enough. You need to know PHP and JavaScript, too. There are web developers who make their living creating and modifying WordPress themes. Part of the job is updating themes so that they remain compatible with new versions of WordPress. Is it reasonable to expect such labor from somebody who just wants to make a website about their favorite fandom or to share pictures of their pets?

Not Just Templates

The situation would be bad enough if it were just templates. It gets worse, though. If you use platforms like WordPress, Ghost, Blogger, Squarespace, Wix, you’re not in full control of what you’ve made. Adding insult to injury, you've got to pay these platforms to host you or have ads injected into what you post.

While you could self-host WordPress and Ghost on a rented VPS, doing so requires a working knowledge of the following:

Being capable of handling this stack can probably get you a six figure salary in a major US metropolitan area. There’s a reason for that. Being a sysadmin can be as thankless a job as being a software developer. It's a hard job to do well, and doing the job poorly can be worse than not doing the job at all.

Being your own sysadmin is no barrel of laughs, either, but that's what self-hosting a website based on a CMS like WordPress demands of people. No wonder they won't if they can avoid it.

Shouting at the Void

Leaving aside the technical difficulties, there is also a social dimension to the problem. People build websites hoping that other people will visit them. The hard part is getting other people to visit.

People can't visit a site if they don't know it exists. There are a few ways people can find a website:

Refuge in a Walled Garden

If people aren't building websites on free hosts like Geocities any longer, or using blogging platforms like WordPress, then where are they? They're on “social media”. Why?