
2025 is the year I create real boundaries with the phone.
It’s Monday, January 6.
Among other things, it’s the anniversary of the first All-Hands meeting at Aquarian Web Studio. It was the day you may be thinking of.
We were coordinating great work, and that meant we had to finally grab a few minutes together and discuss all of it outside of project contexts. Niki still thinks it should have been canceled (right?) I was grateful to be with my team.
Today, my focus has shifted to the ways that the internet as I know it has changed since that time 4 years ago, and how it’s going to impact Aquarian as an internet builder. We’re not dealing with the same set o’stuff that has been crawling along the last 13 years. Search engines have shifted to AI in an effort to become more valuable, and this AI might be your content and that would be “winning,” but in most cases, it will de-incentivize a user from going to your website to get that information because AI presents the answer without that step. With the shift of Twitter to X, millions of social media users endured watching much historic hard work capsize as a trusted third-party partner transactionally made the shift to menacing, and then threatening. Other similarly transacted entities made similar shifts. All of this has made me take a good long look at what we are doing.
Websites are BACK
As grim as AI might make the prospect of being found on the web look, I’m here to suggest that being found on the web may now shift more into a trailing indicator of overall relevancy of the organization in its industry (since AI seems to pride itself on reflecting reality so closely) - which may shift indicators of success more heavily into the branded keywords, as people know what they want to get to and blow by all the distractions. This means one thing for sure - less traction for super repetitive work - keyword-stuffed mediocre blog posts come to mind. I’m willing to entertain this as a possible positive. Those recipe sites have got to go.
As someone who has watched Search Engines develop into whatever they are now from the very beginning, some kind of perfectly-answering AI feels like the end game, based on every change I have followed them making. In other words, I’m not surprised by ending up here. I am surprised at everyone finding it to be the perfect excuse to reveal what they want out of computers. Most of what I read is harrowing - but it’s not from our clients. But all AI is doing is changing the way information is dispensed. It can be used to clarify or obscure. It doesn’t matter if I trust it or not - it’s just going to be what it is, and if it comes for my job, I guess my job moves offline. But it isn’t.
But then again, I am moving part of my job offline. I’ll be designing connected devices this year containing sensors and pretty blinky lights - fun stuff! Restorative! after a lifetime online. Funny how that works.
But specifically - here’s how websites’ roles are shifting:
- Custom websites (like the ones made here and the ones our friends make) aren’t limited to the scope of service set forth by someone else. You decide. The forces that brought us edit-by-clicky buttons, drag-and-drop code editing, and butter-smooth feature adds also own the content on those platforms you log into. You’re not at anyone else’s mercy on ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS.
- Is it useful? Do you have areas of the website that do work for you? Does your website collect uploads? Point to patient forms appropriately? Allow for customer design thinking? Does it avoid pitfalls like password creation that can drive users away? Does it present your perspectives in a way that’s easy to read?
- Does it present you/the big Brand exactly right? Are visitors who come away with the experience ready for another one at the right time interval? This one has always been a thing; right now people are noticing room for realignment with Brands. Costco is a good example. Social media used to cover this, but now it’s the website, the delivery, and all the rest of it.
- In a world where the computers’ opinions are made up for you, websites are going to be the chance we have to really get what we want and need from connectivity - so, what is that?
What about SEO?
I’m here to tell you that I feel that SEO is bigger than the internet now. Some of it is even offline. Essentially, you will be found on the web if you are relevant in real life and solve real problems. Given the chance, I would line it up with Photography and Video as technologies that dethroned previous technologies and then suffered that same fate, along the same vector, further down the timeline. Your SEO depends on so many things now, it can’t even be limited to the computer, content, or code. However, you still measure it here.
Gone may be the days where you could write about an obscure topic, pump out content about it, and become a sought-after opinion on everything around it. Now, it takes a YouTube channel, an attached business, and a community of interested onlookers that come to you on both your terms. I hear education helps, too. What’s the difference? The people. Video conveys faces, intent, personality, beauty - things we’re programmed to need. Relationships- even tiny, transactional ones can emit extra joy in a day. Ironically as I sit here and write, I am doing so in the immediate awareness that unless you’re reading this, it’s just sitting here. And that’s ok. It’s a message for you, the interested party, not the robotic virtue police.
Similarly, being out there for customers, rather than competing for popularity among internet competition, is going to guarantee that people go to your helpful website to continue your transaction / relationship / problem solving on their behalf. Make it useful, first.
You want to have your code right - you want to have the right keywords. The number of these depends on the number of topics you can do the above with, and not a lot else.
SEO monitoring is still valuable to observe trends in audience. Are people suddenly super hot on a product you sell? How might you know? Or, perhaps you’re getting overflow from someone else’s marketing. How can you take advantage of that? Study of SEO and what users who chose your website ultimately end up doing (or not doing) is still essential to follow down.
Does SEO matter? More than ever - but, it has changed. And we are working with new parameters, but not new conventions for good results. Make sense? A good result is not just a sale or an interaction, but the right sale, and a good interaction.
Also, your website security matters. Make sure the data you’re holding onto is something you’re legally allowed to have in its current form and take steps to mitigate carrying around excess Personally Identifying Data. Make sure your PHP and CMS software is up-to-date, and move off of WordPress where project finances allow.
Social Media... nah
Keeping people close has been popularly outsourced to large social media platforms, but this may be becoming untenable. Your website is more important than ever to carry your messaging, without the impediment of weighty algorithms.
Now that the illusion of a free and fair discussion internet on social media has been fragmented, disintegrated, and/or violently reorganized, Aquarian has decided that it’s not a safe space, and we would never point our clients to those platforms in these current states. However, we still create and maintain content channels and blogs on custom websites on a daily basis, which are decentralized, under your control, and designed for you.
Effective immediately, we no longer provide Social Media posting service or advertise for it.
We are moving our social efforts as a company over to LinkedIn, which we have found to host a much more intentionally collaborative space, even when clogged with junk. This transition will take some time, but we are closing Facebook accounts and have done so with Twitter. Come see us over there.
But.. connectivity!
It absolutely positively sends me that the spaces that I’ve enjoyed for what their potential envelops have been reduced to ad spaces and political hornets nests (and worse.) I’m also seeing a possible silver lining - whereas I’m less connected, less distracted, more focused, and thusly do quite a bit more work rather than general observation. Thinking back, there would be nothing wrong with going back to a 1990’s level of exposure to the phone - oh wait, all the calls are spam. Better just put the whole thing away; maybe pick it up to check an app or program for an hour or two and then let the 8PM dramas come on. I mean the fictional ones. The fact remains that I can’t change how the phone makes me feel, or what it tells me, but I can change how much phone I have in my life. This also reduces extra shopping, unnecessarily comparing myself to others, and feelings of anxiousness about the future.

I started creating connected hardware in October, 2024
Here’s the thing
When one door closes another can open. What I’ve also just started talking about is that last year, at the very end, while I wasn’t writing blog posts, I was getting a Certificate in Hardware Design and Internet of Things coding at Central New Mexico Community College. This I won; a competitive, funded opportunity through the City of Albuquerque, where I live. As a Rail Trail Artist, now, I need to spend some time creating a contracted piece of art for the City’s Rail Trail collection - that has some specification for internet connectivity. My training was daily in-person 8-5 with a 30 minute commute. Luckily, I had Niki to turn to for day-to-day operations as I fully embraced this opportunity.
Here’s what I learned: custom, connected devices (which I build) can solve problems at municipal and business levels - both predictively and in real time, are a lot of fun to make, and make use of the internet in ways that doesn’t always require a website or a dashboard.
Holy moly - what fun it was~
So, obviously, we’re going to start doing some of that. And we’re going to share this fun in places that are intentionally collaborative, safe, and appropriate - which is our website, our newsletter, and LinkedIn, for now.
For more immediate information on this program and what I built, check out my Hackster profile.
We’re not in Kansas anymore
Today’s phone-centric internet is openly unsafe, pernicious, and dishonest, even compared to just 6 months ago. Over time, we got used to it being a good place, made for us, to share and be connected, happily. We didn’t notice when instagram took aim at the kids unless it was our kids; we have been effectively groomed to finding good news and entertainment there; and now it still holds as we scroll and scroll and scroll through horrible thing after thing just to try to find it again. This pattern is always a signal that stepping away is necessary before health is compromised. I don’t care what area of life you happen to see it.
I gave my son my old phone this weekend. Just for the camera, no phone number. Before I gave it to him, I told him, and meant it: “The phone internet is horrible. So much worse than computer internet. I say this as someone who has been on it the whole time. It used to be good, but now it is bad.” My relay to you is more nuanced and more time-sensitive (we reserve the right, and may, change this opinion and ensuing approach, any time) but it would contain the same warnings. It’s not a great place to spend time.
We are still here to build a good internet, as long as it matters. And we are remembering that technology and “innovations” that are not used simply, uh, fall out of use. It’s so simple, really. Nobody is subject to this except by their own choices and habits. Personally, I am noticing great things by choosing less phone. After relying on it, looking forward to it, rolling in jobs for it so heavily over the last 20 years, it’s time to set it aside and enjoy other things.