finn schubert's blog

From the Squarespace landing page:

“A website makes it real.”

This is the thing, though. How did it happen that now you need an impeccably designed (possibly overdesigned) website in order to feel like your small business, creative work, side hustle, or whatever other thing is “real”?

Because it’s not just “a website.” No one is saying that tossing up an unformatted glob of text makes it real, even though that is technically a website.

Much as in the same way that other supposedly labor saving devices just created more labor, it feels as though website services like Wix and Squarespace appear to make it easier to create a website, but perhaps have made it harder by upping the design expectations of websites for even the tiniest microbusiness.

Do you remember how the internet used to be?

A time when unvisited hyperlinks were always blue with an underline, and visited hyperlinks were purple with an underline.

When you could just write some HTML and there you had a website and maybe people visited it and maybe they didn’t because search engines weren’t particularly good. Maybe you had a site visitor counter at the bottom of the site and checked on whether it rolled up each time you refreshed the page.

The internet is still built on HTML and CSS, but it no longer feels that way to the average person. How do they make those animations? How does the font size adjust to your phone? Do you think about these things?

I do.

I got tired of feeling like I didn’t get how it all worked. I spend so much of my time online, after all.

And I got tired of paying so much money to Squarespace every month just to have a basic personal website and occasionally sell a book.

But it wasn’t really about the money. It was about the way my Squarespace site made me feel. It never felt quite right. It always felt like I was fitting my stuff into someone else’s container and feeling awkward about it. The big image sections didn’t look good with my pictures. The text sections were never the right size for my text.

And most of all, it made me feel like I had to think in a certain format. Three boxes across the layout? Hope I have three things to fit into them.

I was just done.

How hard could it be to make my own thing?

(to be continued)