Let’s be honest: most websites today are bloated. They try to do too much, and end up doing very little…
— ‘The End of Websites as We Know Them’ by Juan M. Sederino, posted to LinkedIn, May 2025.
I hate it when people begin an online essay with the phrase, “Let’s be honest…” Like most people, I don’t want honesty. I want rainbows and unicorns.
But since we’re sometimes stuck with a person who wants to be honest, we want them to be, at the very least, accurate. And I think Mr. Sederino is being accurate when he says, “most websites today are bloated.”
Not this Pagosa Daily Post website, of course. There’s nothing ‘bloated” about the Pagosa Daily Post. Quite the opposite.
But we’ve all seen ‘bloated’ websites. Amazon.com, for example. If any website is bloated, that’s certainly one of them. Obviously, they are trying to do too much, in the sense of being the biggest retailer in the world. They still have a ways to go, however, to catch up with Walmart’s $629 billion in retail revenue.
But Amazon also offers technology services, including AI.
Reportedly, AI is going to be really, really big someday, when they figure it all out. Instead of going to Walmart to buy new running shoes, and then standing in a long line to check out, AI will already know which running shoes you need and will simply ship them to you the same day your old shoes wear out. You won’t even need to ask.
At the moment, the bugs still haven’t been worked out. When a journalist named Katie Notopoulos asked the Amazon AI named ‘Rufus’ for advice on what she should buy on Prime Day — Amazon’s biggest sale event of the year — ‘Rufus’ told her she should buy a Prime Membership.
How lame is that?
I could have told her. “Don’t buy anything. Save your money, and get ready for the upcoming financial meltdown.” But I’m not AI, so no one listens to me.
On the other hand, I’m not bloated. Like so many websites are.
When Mr. Sederino, in all honesty, complained about bloated websites, his main point concerned websites that are created, instantly, by AI platforms such as Durable, Mixo, Framer AI, and others. He wrote:
What Comes Next
The traditional approach of “let’s build a website” is giving way to on-demand, AI-generated micro-sites. These smart, contextual digital experiences will become increasingly common in marketing, ecommerce, and creative industries.
In this new model:
Designers become curators
Copywriters become editors
Developers focus on innovation rather than repetition
Marketers iterate faster, test more, and spend less
Thankfully, humor columnists are not included in Mr. Sederino’s list. But maybe we’re included under “copywriters”. I would never call myself a “copywriter” but I’m not the boss of the world.
But I’m still the boss of my own humor column. (My editor thinks he’s the boss, and I let him think so.)
The way I understand the current situation, AI platforms learn everything they know from websites. AI platforms actually like bloated websites, because there’s more to learn. So the more bloated website we have, the better AI will function.
In fact, pretty much everything we humans know, nowadays, also comes from bloated websites. Mostly, from bloated shopping websites, and bloated social media websites, and bloated video websites, and bloated self-help websites, and — lest we forget — bloated news websites.
Soon enough, all these websites will be written and updated by AI.
And what has AI learned? That a popular website is always a bloated website.
I tested one of the AI-driven website builders yesterday — one of the platforms mentioned by Mr. Sederino — and it built me a brand new website in less than one minute, full of intelligent-sounding informational text and gorgeous color photos.
But let’s be honest. It was bloated.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.