The Problem Space

I wrote a rambly, ranty post elsewhere a few months ago about not liking tags on either Reddit or Blogspot. 

I've made and frequently remade websites on blogspot for a lot of years. I have a lot of experience with Blogspot and like anyone with substantial experience with something, I have criticisms and opinions about what could be improved.

I know someone whose Blogspot site broke. I don't know what happened. They don't seem to know what happened. They solved it by moving to another platform and are encouraging me to do the same because in the process of moving their site, they are learning HTML.

So I'm hearing that Blogspot SUCKS and removing a third of the GARBAGE coding means posts no longer chug, etc. 

In part because of this project, I checked out the platform they moved to and it involves uploading files and hand coding everything. Unlike this individual, I originally hand coded my sites and then moved to WordPress and then to Blogspot to get away from that.

I still hand code HTML and CSS to some degree across probably all my sites. The way my sites look and function cannot be achieved without knowing and regularly using small amounts of hand coding.

I've largely forgotten a lot of the architectural stuff that Blogspot handles automatically. I use HTML and CSS to enhance formatting and I no longer have to worry about "How do I tell the Internet this is a page on my website?" Or whatever.

I have a list of wants and criticisms and my answer has been learning more about Blogspot and figuring out how to get what I want out of Blogspot. And Blogspot supports letting me hand code bits and pieces of it to get what I want out of it.

I have half-baked good intentions of checking out other platforms. Currently, my understanding is that Wix and Square Space offer templates, which is what Blogspot does. I have no idea how customizable they are.

I have enough criticisms of Blogspot, I could hypothetically draw up a business plan for becoming a competitor of theirs and offering a superior plug and play website experience.

Reality: 

1. Blogspot is one part of the business model for Google. It's a very small part of it. Me imagining I'll make a better plug and play website experience is about like a kindergartener thinking they could write a better first paragraph for your PhD thesis that they don't understand.

2. I moved to Blogspot to get away from spending all my time coding so I could write more. Guess what I would spend ALL my time doing if I tried to start a platform? That's right: Coding.

3. And then the odds are high I will learn "They don't offer that because the code is a nightmare and there are security issues and things no one wants to deal with." 

I say that because my first website was hand coded by a friend as a sub site on her business site. She liked an email I had written and wanted to publish it and with my permission made it a sub site and I was like "Ooh! Make that like a gold name plate on a door! That's great, but tweak it this way!" And I knew nothing about coding and it's a lot harder to do little tweaks to appearance via code than drawing it on paper.

And then there's navigability. If you change link color HERE because THAT would look so COOL!, now it's unreadable someplace else on your site.

Wix has a STUPID, IDIOTIC name that probably is doing them no favors in marketing. They probably have it because it's three letters long and probably wasn't already taken, so they didn't have to pay a fortune for it.

I was Internet acquainted with a guy who owned a two letter domain. He sold it for millions a few years ago. 

Wix should probably make some effort to educate people about that. Because their target market is technically unsavvy "unwashed, illiterate masses" who are probably going "That sounds STUPID!!! I bet everything they do is STUPID!!"

So trying to establish a platform at this late stage in the game has challenges like there's ZERO .com URLs available below a certain length and many shorter names are already owned by someone, even if they aren't really using them. 

So I could go tilting at windmills and try to establish a superior plug and play website experience and blah blah blah and have the latest platform that follows the current general formula of free option and templates and give myself massive coding headaches cubed for trying to solve the backend architecture etc.

And small businesses and community development organizations etc. would probably not see any meaningful advantage over what currently exists because they are on Facebook not because they can't get a free Wix or Square Space site but because they are on a bicycle and the information super highway scares them and they don't know how to deal with it.

So it doesn't really solve the problem I'm interested in solving and it's not really how I want to spend my time. I'm willing to code in service to a particular goal, but I'm not really a programmer and I don't spend my time fascinated with coding challenges. 

I debate if I want to offer this as a paid service -- doing your website and asking you questions to make it good -- knowing you are probably someone who thinks Wix sounds IDIOTIC and if you knew what I know, you wouldn't need to hire me but you don't, so you think you don't need me and, like Wix, I must be an IDIOT.

I read an article in probably Money magazine years ago about a woman with two seasonal businesses because she wanted to put raising her child first. One of those businesses was a service for other small businesses and it wasn't breaking even and the other one was a business chosen because it was active when her primary business wasn't. It's busy season was the slow season for the first.

It's always tricky trying to target small businesses as your market. It's potentially an underserved greenfield with no competition.

It's also potentially a waste of time that will never make you money because if you have talent, you could work for a larger organization for a better payout and spend less time selling yourself. 

And that's probably the crux of why the current state of the art is plug and play website platforms that let you make a website but don't really get into the meat of why micro organizations are tending to stick to Facebook instead.