I’ve been browsing a massive list of blogs and personal websites, and I have noticed a pattern in the websites I just gave up on. This is my nerdy exploration of what the owners did wrong (and what some did right). To avoid shaming and general meanness, I took no screenshots and am naming no names.

WTF is this? – The front page that fails its one vital job

Whatever page a first-time visitor to your website lands on, it needs to do one thing for them. None more so than the front page of your website.

The thing is this: It must answer the 5 questions a visitor might have:

1. WTF is this site?
2. Where’s the content?
3. Why should I give a damn?
4. Where’s the solution to my problem or need?
5. Who are you and why should I listen to you?

You don’t even need to answer them all. One or two clearly answered questions can be enough.

The answer does not need to be a full sentence. It does not even need to be words at all. Your design might be able to answer some questions. Photos might too.

There’s a good reason so many websites have a photo of someone’s face. A photo answers the question “Who are you?” Meanwhile, an “About me” or “About us” link can be enough to answer the rest of the question, “…and why should I listen to you?”

Sometimes pointing to the answer is enough for a landing page. Remember, though, that every click I have to make to get my answer is an opportunity to close my tab and move on.

Some ways in which sites failed all five: WTF am I even here?

The fail: A few websites I visited assumed I knew exactly who they were and why the site existed. They had a list titled something like, “Which of these nine things we named are you here for today?”

None of them, because I have no idea what they are. I’m not in the “in group”, I am an outsider who arrived by mistake. I need you to tell me what your stuff is for before I can choose which section I want.

TL;DR: Don’t make me think.

The win: Sites that got it right either explained who they were (answering 1, 3, and 5) or made it clear, “this is a blog, here are the blog posts” (answering 2, 3, and 4). Sometimes the site was some homebrew monstrosity (as opposed to a homebrew work of art) that still managed to tell me the site was some bloke’s scratchpad of random stuff they wanted to share.

You don’t have to offer a nice-looking website, nor a coherent one. But please, for the love of indiebrowsing, explain what the hell this project is to me (and the rest of the uninitiated).

How to do better: Imagine you are an author with a homebrew indie website, or a blog, or whatever. Your front page should tell me:

1. I’m the author Bob Smith
2. I write time-travelling gothic horror romance
3. Here are my books
4. Here are my thoughts on a bunch of stuff
5. (Optional) Here’s my log of getting the next book written.

You could also have:

• Here are my appearances and book signings
• This is my agent
• Here’s my face
• Here’s my social media
• and whatever else your heart desires to put there

If I am a fan of time-travelling gothic horror romance, I will know I am in the right place. I can find the books (and possibly order any I want to read). Maybe I’ve heard of Bob Smith or read Bob’s books before, which means I will give a whole handful of damns. Maybe I have not heard of Bob Smith, but as I love Bob’s genre, I should give at least one damn – enough to go look at Bob’s stuff.

How am I supposed to read this? – Headache typography

A website, at its most basic, is a bunch of text that links to other text. If i cannot read the text, what was the point?

The fail: I’ve noped out of many websites today for a single shared reason – there was no damn way I was willing to give myself a headache trying to read your text.

Some of the problems include:

• Text with almost no line spacing and precious little paragraph spacing. That’s just a wall of letters that my lazy and dyslexic brain refuses to convert into meaning.
• Line lengths longer than some PMs rime in office. The received wisdom is that optimal line length for reading is between 50 and 75 characters. Long lines are hard for me to read.
• Tiny text – I can fix this by zooming in, but not always and almost always the site looks significantly uglier zoomed.
• Text colour that is quite similar to the background colour. Sure, I could inject some CSS on my end, but I have many sites to look at; yours did not inspire me to try.

The win: Most WordPress themes do a reasonable job of making text readable. So too do the layouts of many a work of art homebrew website.

Example: Let us go back to imagining you are the author Bob Smith. You are looking to get more people into time-travelling gothic horror romance books. I arrive on your website after following a link on a random blog. I know nothing about your genre, and I’ve never heard of you.

Nevertheless, I stick around long enough to learn you are an author. What do you suppose would happen next when I struggle to read your terrible layout of tiny text, line lengths of 289 characters, line spacing that tries to cram as much text on the screen as possible, and a low-contrast font and background colour set?

I’m going to think, “Who is this self-published hack?” and then I might think, “If they think this text is good to read, how bad will their books be?”

And off I go, never to read Bob’s books or consider the genre of time-travelling gothic horror romance ever again.

What most blogs get right

By their very nature, most blogs get two of the five vital questions right.

1. WTF is this site? Oh, it’s someone’s blog. Cool.
2. Where’s the content? Oh, cool, it’s right here.

This is true even if there is only a menu item that says “blog”.

This is how you get the rest right

The question, “Why should I give a damn?” is answered by anything that shows me what the site is for. Links, design, and images need to conspire to reassure me that this site is for me. Unless it really is not for me; in which case, let me find out quickly so I can move on.

For the question, “Where’s the solution to my problem or need?” you need one or more of a bunch of things (list below). All these things have something in common – they help me find the things I want to look at.

• Clearly marked site search
• Tag cloud, Categories list, or topics directory
• A browsable summary of blog posts
• Links to your newest or most popular stuff
• Explanations as to what each section is for

Finally, we come to “Who are you and why should I listen to you?” This is where a sidebar bio, an about link, or, in a pinch, a subtitle comes in. Some element of your design, layout, and content needs to explain who you are and the reasons you feel qualified to write stuff.

Sometimes, the content is self-demonstrating. I’ve seen a bunch of photo blogs today. It is quickly clear that the reason I should “listen” is because you have nice photos, and I like looking at nice photos. In one case, the blog was not in English, but the photography spoke for itself. I had a nice time browsing the blog and loved all the trees and greenery being shown.

What many homebrew websites get right

For every website that left me scratching my head and trying to work out what the heck I was even looking at, there was another homebrew site that said, “I’m Bob, and this is my nerdy website” or words that did the same for whoever made the thing.

One thing I love about homebrew websites – especially the passion-project ugly sites – is that they tell me who made it and what they made it for. Even if that site is just a dumping ground for whatever tickled their ADHD that day. This is something some of the work-of-art homebrew sites could do more of.

I’ve seen many well-crafted, beautifully typeset works of design brilliance today. One had fantastic animations that flew the content in like a PowerPoint presentation. The problem was, I had no idea what the site was about. I clicked about for a bit and then gave up.

All the homebrew sites that got the basics right also did something else very well. They all had an easy-to-find link to their Mastodon account. Mastodon seems to be popular with the homebrew crowd. Where you can follow the person or people behind the site is part of “who are you?” And can let me get to know said persons which will answer the “…and why should I listen to you?” part.

The homebrew sites that interested me and gave a link to social media got their maker a follow.

How to fail at three questions and lose me

There were some sites today that failed to keep my attention because they did not answer at least one of these questions:

3. Why should I give a damn?
4. Where’s the solution to my problem or need?
5. Who are you and why should I listen to you?

The fail: One site, who shall remain nameless, was a blog of what appeared to be affiliate links disguised as answers to questions; another was the same but with “product reviews”, and a third was a collection of lists of “ten things”.

All three failed to earn my trust. The affiliate link slingers were too fast to jump into “click this” without even trying to show they knew what they were talking about. The list maker likewise failed to establish any level of trust, as they just wanted to rattle off their lists as fast as possible.

All three failed at the same task – establishing any level of topic authority.

The win: I spent some time on one blog that had clearly marked affiliate links (Amazon). I still have a tab open on that blog post. What this blogger did right was that they talked about the problem they had and how they went about solving it. Then, when they came to list the materials they used, they had earned the right to slap down some money-maker links because I trusted that they were first and foremost sharing knowledge, not trying to drain my bank account for their corporate overlords.

How to get everything right and still fail with the help of AI

Three websites saw their tab closed at lightspeed today. They had all five questions answered within the page I landed on by virtue of being a WordPress blog with a nice-looking theme. What they also had were featured images that were clearly AI.

I like to play with AI. I have a blog where I post about playing with AI. And I do mean playing – I like to make AI do silly things and become daft characters. What I do not like is how lazy it feels when I see AI as a featured image on a blog post.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel that way, but I do. In every case where I saw AI images decorating blog posts, I noped out of there as fast as my mouse would let me.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

So that’s my take on a thing I was doing today. There are five things a web page needs to answer, and two or three is probably enough. If you want people to engage with your stuff, you should probably try to make sure the page answers all five (if only with a clear menu item):

1. WTF is this site?
2. Where’s the content?
3. Why should I give a damn?
4. Where’s the solution to my problem or need?
5. Who are you and why should I listen to you?

I hope my rant about all the things that put me off about the sites I saw today entertained or helped you in some way. Please leave comments or replies with your additions, objections, ideas, praise, accusations of hypocrisy, or any other related thoughts.

When I started The Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language (2014 or thereabouts), AI was for games, and LLMs had yet to be invented. Every part of my book was written by a human. Future additions will be written by a human. That human is me.

I am a fan of correct information, and LLM AIs are, on the whole, entirely Divaricate Truthers. (see video below).

While yes, I like to do silly things with AI and share them for your amusement, no creative work of mine used, uses, or will use AI. In my opinion, AI should be used for games to make them fun. No LLMs needed.

TL;DR: Unless it was very silly, AI was not involved.

Here’s me reading from my book:

It is entirely possible that Baroness Benjamin has placed Author Buzz UK on the chopping block without meaning to.

I grew up watching Floella Benjamin on television. She started appearing on TV the year I was born (yes, I am very old). So imagine my surprise to see her name on a private members’ bill that could shut down UK-based Mastodon instances along with Author Buzz and possibly a lot of forums and blogs.

Author Buzz (UK) is a small forum for book lovers and authors where sharing news and talking about books is the norm. It has some social media features such as following and posting status updates. It also hosts blogs, allows users to create forums, and pulls RSS feeds from relevant bookish sources.

All that could go away if this bill passes, as I would have to apply for a license and employ specialists to comply with all the terms.

Here’s the definition of social media according to the bill:

Meaning of social media platform

For the purposes of this Act, a “social media platform” means a platform which—

(a) has the sole or significant purpose of enabling users to create, share, discover or consume user-generated content;

(b) enables users to discover, interact with or follow the content or accounts of users other than those with whom they communicate privately.

Section 3 of the Social Media Platforms (Ofcom Licensing) Bill [HL] 2026

Those are some broad terms. Part (b), for example, could be argued to describe forums along with blogs with RSS feeds and comments. This could hit Author Buzz UK in every way possible.

A blog with comments and an RSS feed of comments allows users to discover user-generated content satisfying part (a). The RSS feed satisfies part (b), allowing following the content of others. As a network of blogs and forums, Author Buzz is a social media. As a UK-based site, it would be regulated into dust.

I take comfort in the fact that private members’ bills rarely pass. Otherwise, Author Buzz UK would have to come down, and most of my other blogs could be likewise under the hammer.

While it is still alive, why not visit Author Buzz and tell us what you are reading?

Webmention is a great idea. An idea that could be used for even more things than it is used for right now. These are some wild and unfettered ideas I had today about Webmention and things you could do with it.

Introduction

In the wee small hours of this morning, I added a new section to Open Mentions – Brainstorming. The first brainstorming topic I added was New Uses of Webmention.

In this section, I’m going to introduce my topic and explain what brainstorming is so all readers are up to speed. You can skip to the wild ideas if you wish.

What is brainstorming?

Brainstorming is when a bunch of people get together to generate ideas. All ideas are written down, and only later are any of them validated. This means that the silly-sounding idea that might turn out not to be so silly gets a chance to breathe without anyone holding back for fear of looking silly.

Brainstorming is a creativity technique in which a group of people interact to suggest ideas spontaneously in response to a prompt. Stress is typically placed on the volume and variety of ideas, including ideas that may seem outlandish or “off-the-wall”. Ideas are noted down during the activity, but not assessed or critiqued until later. The absence of criticism and assessment is intended to avoid inhibiting participants in their idea production.

Brainstorming, Wikiedpia

What’s Webmention, then?

Webmention is a cool technology that allows you to ping a page to tell it that you have mentioned it. The page admin can then list mentions if they like.

Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.

Webmention, IndieWeb

On almost all my blogs, Webmention is a way you can post comments by posting your own content on your own blog or website. I think everyone should give it a go.

You don’t even need to run Webmention on your blog to ping another one. When you are done reading this (assuming you are reading on my blog and not on Mastodon or something), you will see a form where you can ping your mention to this post. My blog will do all the work for you.

I’ve written a lot about Webmention in the past, including a list of every last Webmention library I could find. Webmention was the inspiration for Open Mentions. It seemed like such an obvious idea that I was surprised no one had made something like it already. Maybe there are more Webmention ideas out there in the wild; we should share them.

No one is going to pick up your idea and run with it unless they first encounter your idea.

Webmention links

• webmention.io – a third-party service for webmentions.
• brid.gy – a service for sending webmentions

The wild ideas

The yes-and-no debate with twin webmentions

Most questions in the real world are not so much yes or no and more, “it depends” and “sometimes, perhaps”. This is what makes a good yes-and-no debate fun. Imagine someone writes a post introducing a question and publishes it with two Webmention endpoints – one for arguing yes and the other for arguing no.

From a technical standpoint, I would imagine that the twin mentions format actually has two child pages with one endpoint each.

For WordPress, I guess this would be a post that has two custom post types attached, such that example.com/post/my-question has example.com/post/my-question/yes and example.com/post/my-question/ne. The post might need some sort of custom template to show two columns of comments (which is how WordPress stores mentions).

Go, sports team!

This one might take a bit of work to set up. You generate a set of pages, one for each team in the sport you follow. Add to each one an 88×31 in the team’s colours – maybe other banner sizes as well – and some copy-and-paste code to make adding it easy. Now, every blog with an author who supports the team can:

1. Show team pride with a nice badge
2. Add their page to the team page so other supporters of the sports team can find them.

Enthusiasts could post match reports, news, transfers, and all the other stuff sports lovers like to track and talk about. With a simple link and a ping, the news ends up on an Open Topic where the sports team’s fans might lurk.

I’m not a sports person myself. I understand that it is a fun form of mostly harmless tribalism that others enjoy, though. If there are enough personal website-owning sports fans, this could be a thing.

I believe that… AKA author infoboxes

You may wish to select a finite, bounded set of ideas for this one, but what about a set of pages that can be linked to (perhaps with 88×11 badges) for personal beliefs, political ideas, and other worldviews?

With a substantial enough collection, you might have enough that your personal website or my personal website could fully enumerate all of our opinions on a subset of all matters in the world.

While there might be some scope for some heated debates, there could also be some fun ones. I’m thinking of the topic of bedtime.

• I believe early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and rich.
• I believe the best ideas happen after midnight
• I believe that mornings should be illegal

You get the idea.

A variant idea (using 88x31s perhaps) might be a collection of userboxes like the ones on Wikipedia. Webmention could ensure that each page is a self-updating directory of who claims which tag/box/label/thing.

I made something somewhat similar with isbrill.com, except you can’t (currently) vote agreement with Webmention (only ActivityPub). I should probably fix that.

Book review Open Topic

If you did a little coding so that every ISBN had a page, you would have a distributed Webmention-powered API for book reviews.

Personally, I’d have a system that has a URL ending with an ISBN. The system assumes all ISBNs are valid (within reason) and generates a page if one has not yet been made. There’s enough API for book information that, over time, you could populate the pages with a book cover, blurb, author, and other related bookish details.

This idea is basically Open Mentions but for books.

Maybe you don’t want to do that for all possible books, but if you are an author, maybe do it for each of your books. That way you collect reviews on your site for your books (social proof moves mountains) and you can learn a little about your readers.

Voting on The Web We Want (not my idea, but it was too cool to leave out).

The Web We Want is a site where various possible wants for the web are listed, and votes come in by WebMention.

Votes are tallied from webmention “bookmarks” and “likes” of each want’s page. These could be hand-crafted webmentions sent from your own site or shares and likes on social media services combed by Brid.gy. We’re hopeful that this approach captures community sentiment well, but reserve the right to change or alter the voting process in the future.

Voting for the web you want

I only learned about this site today, and it is, in my opinion, a fantastic idea.

Run polls with Webmention

Polls are fun. At least, I think they are. Rarely do I let a poll scroll past me on social media without a vote. Now, I will admit to being something of a munchkin – I will gleefully vote in polls I don’t understand. I am why you need a large sample set so that noise like me doesn’t skew your results.

Webmention can be used to send likes. And, as such, a mention with content is just a vote with an added comment.

All you would need is a page for the question and pages for the answers. Icing on the cake would be a bit of the question page that counts the mentions on its children and gives you a vote chart. To be honest, this is the exact same technology needed for the yes-and-no debate idea.

Make a fan site for a band or musician you love

I imagine it would not be too much work to make a minisite with every album, song, and tour of your favourate music group. Now you and other fans can track exactly what the fandom is talking about right now.

I imagine you might find lyrics and their meanings filed under songs, reviews for albums, and selfies with the band on certain tour pages.

To be honest, any band with an indieweb fan contingent should probably set this up for themselves (or get the fan club manager to do it).

What now?

Those ideas are all nice and everything, but what now?

Well, you have a few options:

• Pray, hope, or chant in the hope someone implements the idea you like.
• Actually talk about the idea you like, in the hope that someone with the right skills fancies making it happen.
• Say, “hold my drink,” and write a brainstorming post of your own.
• Shrug, agree these are nice ideas and get on with your day.
• Steal one or more of these ideas. No, seriously, help yourself.
• Leave a long, rambly comment that should have been a blog post.
• Something else…

Whatever you choose, this is the bit where I say, “over to you”. Comment, mention, or reply. Like, share, or subscribe to my RSS feed. Come on, we all know how this bit works.

Thoughts?

So, I saw a weird headline on social media today: “How having a disability became cool“. Oh dear lord, here we go again. Another author of “news” that is entirely made up… Deep sigh.

Poppy Coburn, Associate Comment Editor for The Telegraph, takes a pop at the “‘sickfluencers’, are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend”. Except the only ones using that word are news outlets trying to sell newspapers. It’s made up.

Two years on, there’s an avalanche of results talking about it. The thing is, all of those pages and pages of news articles are all quoting each other. It’s as if a whole trend has been summoned into being just so the people summoning it can be outraged.

Another title for this might have been: Why is the press so keen to demonise my people? Because the right-leaning whiney-bitch newspapers (such as The Sun and The Daily Mail) lead the charge in attacking people with mental health issues, coining the term “sickfluencer” back in 2024.

Disabled people living with mental health conditions came on the receiving end of an exponential surge in corporate media attacks against benefit claimants in 2024.

REVEALED: MSM disproportionately targets mental health-related DWP claimants in attack articles

This is the thing, there’s no such thing as a “sickfluencer”. It’s a BS term that the panic merchants want to sell you because hate and panic make money.

The DWP already apply rigorous means testing. Under the Conservatives, they turned that assessment up to 11 to placate the Daily Mail. The result was chaos, suffering, and deaths. There’s no free ride on benefits.

The mind boggles that people believe that sick people are getting £60,000. If that were the case, where’s my cash? Oh, right, it doesn’t exist.

Under both Conservative and Labour governments, the DWP have colluded with the press to demonise younger claimants living with mental health issues, ADHD and autism. Ministers have joined in, to create a smokescreen which obscures the politically inconvenient truth that the majority of those at risk of losing their personal independence payment (PIP) under the Green paper proposals are older people with physical health conditions – many of whom have worked all their adult life until they became ill.

Mental health PIP claimants demonised as cover for massive assault on physical health awards

Being disabled isn’t “suddenly cool”. The truth that so frightened these journalists is that suffering in silence is a thing of the past. I certainly gave up struggling unseen – I started a whole blog about it.

Just because I picked up a physical disability, it doesn’t make the mental health crap I suffer from any less real. Now I get a pass because I have a “real” disability. I’ve got a strange brain and a broken body – that’s twice as hard, not easier.

I’m not sitting back in my mansion raking in piles of cash. I’m spending money I don’t have to try and live my life somewhat normally. Yeah, I get a bit of PIP. It’s not a fortune. It covers a few cabs and some assistance. Just like everyone else, I have to budget as well as I can to get by. I am not part of the have-yachts; I’m part of the have-to-be-careful crew. Same as most everyone else.

Rather than reposting two-year-old Daily Mail BS, can we not have a journalist with a shred of journalistic integrity willing to call out the snowballing lie? But no. Apparently, Poppy would rather repeat the attack line given to her by the hate media just so there’s someone the rabid crowd can point out as “the reason things are bad”.

If the billionaire newspaper owners can get you hating the poor and the sick, maybe you won’t notice that they were the ones that fucked up the world.

Struggling weirdo’s like me are not the reason for the cost of living. We’re not trying to be cool. You are being lied to by the 1% through the mouthpiece of the likes of Poppy Coburn.

To end on a better note, here is a podcast taking a more level-headed approach to the silly headlines, including a guest who was on the direct receiving end of it.