NOT thinking about websites like a 9-year-old
3 October, 2024
My wife was away on business the other week, and when I asked our 9-year-old if there was anything he wanted to do while Mummy was gone, he said (to my great surprise): build a website.
I very quickly had to break it to him that, actually, there probably already is a website about Taylor Swift, and maybe two or three about Harry Potter. But I suggested instead that we could make a website about something only he knows about. Naturally, that left us with... well, us.
I'm not going to bore you with the details of the resulting website ("The Ladds"), nor will I link to it, because we've decided to leave it on my laptop rather than available to the world. (An important teachable moment about what you should and shouldn't share online.)
But walking him through the most basic concepts of creating a website, it was nice seeing the pure joy on his face when a few lines of code made his vision pop up on screen. It was a really visceral demonstration that working with code can (and should) be fun. It's creative and visual and expressive, just as much as writing or drawing is.
It also seemed like a great anecdote to write about for this blog, and with my work head screwed on I drafted a very SEO-friendly, clickbaity article about Things You Can Learn By Thinking About Websites Like A 9-Year-Old.
But aside from the sort of slimy feeling that came from turning a nice moment with my kid into LinkedIn fodder, I also realised, reading it over, that while it might have been Good Content™, it wasn’t particularly good content. It was something so generic that any old digital content strategist — or, to be honest, any decent AI — could have dreamed it up without much trouble. And while I don't doubt it contained some Actionable Insights that someone might have found useful, it simply wasn't me.
And that felt like an anecdote I could write about. What does it say about Good Content™ that it's not necessarily good content?
As a writer, I worry about this. As a writer who studied the sociology of culture, I worry about it even more, because I spent a long time researching how the tools we have for creating culture inevitably affect the form that culture takes. Epic poems and Shakespeare plays use meter and rhyme partly for aesthetics, sure, but partly because that made them easier to remember and recite, when the printed word was still exotic and most people couldn't read anyway; albums are usually around forty-five minutes long, even today, because that's how much music used to fit on a standard 12" vinyl record; cave paintings are in caves because that's all early humans had.
Likewise, when I'm writing something for my website today, I automatically reach for snappy questions that can be answered with a series of bullet points, because Google likes that sort of thing. I reach for attention-grabbing hooks that are likely to cut through a feed ("thinking about websites like a 9-year-old") regardless of whether I have all that much to say about them. That's where the tools I have for creating culture are steering me.
And sure, in some respects that's no different from Dante reaching for terza rima to make sure people remembered it correctly. But at least Dante has some deeper artistic merit. I somehow doubt people are going to be sitting around in eight hundred years holding up listicles as a valuable contribution to the Western canon. The tools we have today tend towards writing that's superficial, generic, and more concerned with the functional than the aesthetic.
I'm not saying, by the way, that it's impossible to write articles that are both optimised for SEO or the feed or a particular content strategy or whatever, and also just great little articles in their own right. (I'm also not saying that this article is either.) But I suppose I am saying — for keeping myself accountable if nothing else — that before you hit publish on that next piece of Good Content™, you should have a long, hard, honest reckoning about whether it's good content too. There's more to life than supplicating to the algorithms.