Note: This was originally sent as a newsletter. If something doesn’t make sense written here on the site, that’s probably why. But, as you’ll discover in this article, my site will be changing anyway.
Before my daughter inevitably wakes up and this very brief spark of creative writing gets replaced with toasting a bagel and probably turning on Peppa Pig so I can escape to the bathroom, I want to write about the industry’s new tribal call:
Websites are dead.
I’m reminded of 2012 when the very same industry declared Email is dead while I was closing a multi-million dollar deal where the newsletter was the primary value.
Is traffic dead/dying? As we’ve become used to it, yeah, kinda. Google has aggressively moved toward its ultimate plan of zero click searches, Facebook is a disgusting landfill that traps you inside if you are insane enough to visit in the first place, and even newsletters face the threat of ai inbox summaries.
Traffic as we once knew it is dying because big tech is doing what they were always going to do: keep you on the platform at any and all costs. Shareholders have families you know?
(I’m a shareholder.)
But to say websites are dead? They aren’t. What’s dead is what we’ve chosen to put on our websites.
This morning, I actually went to my own site to write an article. Since I primarily write for my own therapeutic reasons, I avoid using my newsletter because the anxiety of open rates and feedback are the opposite of therapy, even though neither of those metrics matter at all since I sell nothing and make $0.
But anyway, when I logged into WordPress and clicked Add Post, there was an error. Something about something, I can’t remember, but it was broken enough that I couldn’t write anything. (Update: fixed so I could post this here.)
Since I had negative interest in figuring out how to fix it, I stopped for a second and looked at my site. It had been a while.
It’s horrible. But it’s not just mine. It’s almost every site.
Websites have been largely unchanged over the past 25 years, and we didn’t expect them to eventually suffer? Instead, we allowed big tech to convince us to further abandon what makes websites special, create for their platforms instead, and then we expected no consequences?
That’s our fault.
But websites are not dead. A domain is a domain. It’s your special part of the Internet that you own. It’s your piece of digital land that you can do absolutely anything you want on.
You can just put a photo of you flipping off the camera and that’s it. You can just post a poop emoji. You can write a 500,000 word story about Peppa Pig secretly conquering the world and human meat becoming the new overrated bacon that everyone seems to oddly obsess over.
You can do anything you want! But yet… we all have been doing the same thing all of these years, hoping and praying to be blessed by the distribution engines who were sucking the souls out of us with bigger plans beyond us.
It’s true that answer sites are dead. But, really, they should be dead. It was a fun moment in time when we could repackage existing content and make a living from it. It was a fun moment in time when we could share our version of a recipe or our take on a city in Hawaii, rank for it, and make a living.
The Internet, since its inception, has always opened windows and then slammed them shut on our fingers. It’s always been that way and always will.
But reeling this back in to how bad my site is. The content on it is actually pretty great even if I am biased: it’s unique, it has authority, and it’s pretty well written.
In the end, though, it’s just a blog. It’s a 2010 WordPress installation with articles of text on it.
In today’s world of short attention spans, an overwhelming abundance of free, smart-sounding text (LLMs), and algorithms designed to hook you, why would anybody really ever care that my site exists?
The blog format is a dinosaur and not one of the cool ones we wish were still around.
If you go to just about any site you can remember from 10 years ago, maybe even 20, it’s probably for the most part the same. The owner might have given it a facelift at some point and moved some things around, but that’s it.
We need to rethink the entire premise of what a website actually even is.
And that’s what I did with my site after seeing the error. Why repair the wheel of a broken, rusted out tricycle?
This domain is my piece of land. I can do anything I want to do on it, so what would I do with it if I actually wanted people to care enough to type my name followed by dot com into their browser every day?
Here’s what I came up with and what I think is, at the very least, the foundation of the next generation of websites.
First, they need to feel alive. They need to be living, breathing organisms that are not shackled to me sitting down, logging into the admin of a bloated CMS with 500 plugins, and manually typing away.
Instead of arriving at my site, reading a dumb opener about who I am and seeing a list of headlines, it needs to feel like you’ve entered into my lab, into my garage where I’m building something.
It needs to feel like there is something unfinished that you cannot wait to see where it goes.
It needs to feel like you could dig around this garage laboratory for hours and continue finding something new.
It needs an element of voyeurism, like you’ve gained access to something nobody else has seen. It’s authentic and it’s real, and that’s what makes it feel better than social media and more human than large language models.
But that’s only possible if we also rethink how we manage our websites.
The friction between my brain and what goes on my site needs to be zero. WordPress, Webflow, Wix, and every other CMS is moving toward being able to update with your phone. But it’s not enough.
This is an age where anybody can code anything. I spent two hours tying Telegram to an endpoint on a prototype of my new site that allows me to text anything and it appears on the site exactly where I want it.
Long form articles are fine (this is one after all), but people want to see the thoughts and notes along the way.
I need to be able to record a 45 second audio message, hit send, and it’s on my site.
I need to be able to take a photo and speak for 15 minutes, and it gets converted into my writing style and posted to the site.
I need to eventually be able to tie real life objects to my site that can be monitored and viewed in real time.
The list goes on, but we need to move into the future where websites are updated at the speed of social media but in any way you want it to be updated.
Again, anybody can code anything now. You can build whatever you want and make it do anything you can dream of.
We chain ourselves to social media because it has distribution, create content on their terms in their format, and then pray they will bless us enough to surface that watered down version of what we can really do.
Websites need to evolve into something worth visiting. Worth typing the URL into the browser.
It feels like staring at a mountain because we can’t remember or imagine a world where big tech platforms aren’t the only path to success. And it is a mountain, don’t get me wrong, but it feels like the beginning of the healing process.
Websites are not dead. Websites just need to feel alive again.
They need to finally join the future. Stop shackling yourself to what used to be or what a cookie cutter CMS allows you to do or what social media wants you to do.
The domain is yours and only yours. We have all the tools now to create anything we want on it.
Yes, I’m nostalgic for the days we all used to go directly to websites. But I also feel strongly that the blandness of the new ai-driven slop Internet is going to give rise to new formats, new concepts, and new ways to discover humanity.
And the medium will be websites. Beautiful, wild, chaotic, and now incredibly capable websites.
