Who makes these websites

It's incredible. Perhaps I need to be reminded why people put up websites. Is it so that the CEO can tick the "Have website" check box. So that the IT manager can get over being hassled about [lack of] progress on a company website. Or so that people can have a grand occassion at some hotel to launch the website. Garbage.

Now, I've never been one to pay much attention to web stuff. That, to me, has always been another, ethereal world. In which wizards do whatever they do. Magic I think it's called. I have read HTML tutorials innumerable times. [As it is I'm now reading PHP ones] It's torture. I can never seem to get my head around this web stuff. And always at the end of the tutorial [listing of tags or functions or whatever], I find myself shaking my head, wondering what I'm meant to do with it all. I find thinking in Prolog orders of magnitude easier than thinking in HTML. And that's not including aesthetics and employing one's so called creative side. Torture.

My long standing apathy towards websites has been somewhat shaken lately. My visists to corporate websites in search of info have yielded great surprises. The first is a complete lack of said information. Information that a typical user or customer or whatever would go to the site to get. Then there are those who don't update their information. Same thing. What's the point. Are the pages there as some historical edifice or something. Is a URL something you acquire to put in marketing materials or is it meant to serve some kind of [more] meaningful purpose. Then there's the sad tale of the missing links. Reminds me of GHC and Zinjanthroupus. Let me click on this About link and see what these guys have to say about themselves. 404. Or guys who boldly tell you "click here!", only there's no applicable link anywhere in the vicinity for you to "click here!" on. Some guys do give you plenty of links to click on, but after furious clicking, disabling of NoScript, and generally wondering if those lingering thoughts of you going senile aren't that farfetched, you look up and discover that all of them point to the same place. Hompage/#. Why torture me so. And today, another surprise. Guys advertise a URL, but if you go to the home page, you'll never be able to navigate to said URL. Why? There's no way to get there, apart from doing a Ctrl+L and typing the link as given.

The way I see it, some of these guys are just small business owners who want to get on with their lives, and wrestling with things like CMSs [can't wrap my head around this one either] isn't what they want to be doing. Although they could do some due diligence and mystery customer kind of stuff. The same way the restaurant owner can discover that there aren't enough forks, or the bar owner that there aren't enough glasses. But everyone's too busy running the business to think about customers. Some are big companies. Not big companies selling soap. Big companies that would require you to know awk for them to hire you. What excuse will suffice here I wonder. Beats me. I can't create a web page, let alone a web site. But. Who are making these websites. Why are so many so inadequate.