Websites are fine

Robin Rendle and Chris Coyier going back and forth on embarassing, broken, janky websites.

Robin:

"The baseline for websites is not great. Okay, fine, most websites are pure unadulterated, straight-up bad."

Chris:

"Pick a theme on WordPress.com and spin up a simple blog. Do an eCommerce thing on SquareSpace and sell painted pencil erasers. Use an Astro template to build your next media endeavor. They will be very much fine out of the box. Better than fine. Pretty damn decent, really."

That websites are not fine is the position of content-, accessibility-, reader-focused web designers, though. The Internet, however, is on balance not for these people. There is a thriving IndieWeb(tm) scene rife with good websites. Robin and Chris both have good websites. Zach Leatherman just posted a website (itself: good) with 42 links to groundbreaking blog posts about the web, and all of those sites are also good. The Internet that caters to web designers is good, and has been good for a long time.

But as I say, the Internet is not for web designers. It's not for good websites. It's not even, really, for creating or consuming content. Those are just means to the Internet's real end: turning people's attention into money. You don't want a "sticky position ad for Geico right in the middle of it"? You don't want the "newsletter subscribe modal"? These are, unfortunately, profitable—or at any rate they make all the KPIs at the automobile insurance and newsletter subscription companies fly way up and to the right so fast that everyone in the boardroom's eyes spin around in their heads. These people get to make the decisions, and as far as they're concerned, the Internet is very much fine.