UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Everybody has a website now, or feels like they should. Almost nobody can tell you what one actually is.

That's not a knock. For most people a website is just a thing you type into a bar and it shows up. It's like asking somebody how their electricity works. It works. Why are you asking.

But if you run a business, or you're about to pay somebody to build you a site, it's worth knowing what you're actually buying. And I've got a long, slightly embarrassing history with this question, so let's start there.

GeoCities and Dragon Ball

My first website was on GeoCities, and it was about Dragon Ball.

If you missed GeoCities: it launched in 1994 and handed out free web space to anybody who wanted it. When you signed up, you picked a "neighborhood" based on what your page was about, and that neighborhood became part of your address. It was the internet as a giant suburb, and every house was built by some kid with no idea what he was doing.

I was one of those kids. I just wanted to post information about Dragon Ball. Characters, episodes, whatever I could find. That was the whole mission. Nobody asked me to. Nobody was paying me. I just wanted the info to exist somewhere, and I wanted it to be mine.

Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for about $3.6 billion and shut down the U.S. version in 2009. Volunteers scrambled to archive as much of it as they could before it went dark, which tells you how much of the early internet lived there.

MySpace and the copy pasta era

Then MySpace showed up and turned an entire generation into accidental web designers.

MySpace launched in 2003, and because of how the site was built, it let you drop your own HTML and CSS right into your profile. So we all did. Background images that made the text unreadable. Glitter. A song that auto-played the second anybody landed on your page. Your Top 8, which was a whole social crisis of its own.

And almost none of us actually wrote that code. We copy-pasted it. There were entire websites that existed just to hand out MySpace layouts. You'd find one you liked, highlight a wall of code you didn't understand, paste it into your "About me," hit save and pray.

Copy pasta was the curriculum. Millions of people learned what HTML and CSS were that way, me included, without ever deciding to learn to code.

Then I stayed away for a long time

Here's the honest part. I've been in tech since 2009, and for a lot of those years I mostly stayed out of building websites.

Not because I didn't care. I had ideas the whole time. But real websites meant real code, and real code meant a wall I couldn't copy-paste my way over. Every time I thought about building something properly, I'd hit the part where you actually have to know how all the pieces fit, and I'd go back to fixing everybody else's computers.

Now I vibe code

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, posted about something he called "vibe coding": describing what you want to an AI, letting it write the code and steering it until the thing works. It caught on so fast that Collins Dictionary made it their Word of the Year for 2025.

That's how I build now. This site, the chat assistant, the blog you're reading: I describe it, AI writes it, and I push back until it's right. The projects I sat on for years are finally getting finished.

The tech finally caught up with my ideas. (Kidding. Mostly.)

But I'll be straight with you, because it matters. Vibe coding is copy pasta with a much better source. It's powerful, and it's also confident when it's wrong. Studies keep finding security holes in AI-written code, and if you don't understand the basic pieces, you can't tell when it built you a house with no locks. (More on that in The Robots Are Already Here.)

Which brings me back to the original question.

So what is a website?

Strip away everything and a website is four things.

1. A name. Your domain, like m1ygrndn.com. You rent it, usually by the year, from a company called a registrar. It's your address.

2. An address book. DNS is how the internet looks up which computer actually has your site. You type the name, DNS points to where the files live. It's the map.

3. A computer that never turns off. Hosting is a server somewhere that holds your files and hands them to anyone who asks, all day, every day.

4. A folder of files. The website itself. Mostly three kinds:

• HTML is the structure. The walls and the words. Headings, paragraphs, buttons, images.
• CSS is the style. Paint, fonts, colors, layout, how it looks on a phone.
• JavaScript is what moves. Menus that open, forms that check what you typed, chat bubbles that pop up.

That's it. Everything else, like online booking, email at your own domain and contact forms, is something plugged into those four pieces.

When I was posting Dragon Ball info on GeoCities, GeoCities handled the name, the address book and the computer. I only had to worry about the files, and that was plenty to mess up. MySpace went one step further and only let me touch the style. Today the pieces are split up and you can choose each one yourself, which is great, as long as somebody on your side knows where each piece lives.

What every business owner should know

You don't need to code. You do need to know four answers:

• Who owns your domain? It should be in your name, on an account you can log into. Not the web guy's. Not your cousin's.
• Where is the DNS managed? That's where your website and your email get pointed. Whoever controls it controls both.
• Who's hosting it, and who's paying for it? If the card on file expires, your site can go dark.
• Can you get your files? If the person who built it disappears tomorrow, can you take the site somewhere else?

If you can answer all four, you own a website. If you can't, you're renting one from whoever can.

Still under construction

GeoCities gave us a free place to put our stuff. MySpace showed us the code was right there if we wanted to mess with it. AI is the first time the gap between "I have an idea" and "it's live" got small enough for people like me to walk across.

Every page back then seemed to have a little "under construction" sign on it somewhere. It looked like an apology for being unfinished.

Turns out it just meant somebody was still building.

— g