What kind of design blog is this, anyway?

For years, blogs have been relegated to slop designed to appeal to search engines, rather than users. In fact, I’d estimate 85-95% of blogs written today are written for search engines, with almost zero consideration for their actual use or value to human beings.

In fairness, most website owners don’t want to write a blog. They do it because they hired someone who told them they had to. It’s almost never the actual business owner or expert writing on the topic anyway. Traditionally, it was slop produced by low-wage writers working in developing countries. In more recent years, their work has been replaced with AI writers, like ChatGPT and Claude.

Amazingly, while the grammar has gotten better, it seems like the final product is actually worse. How could this be? Well, at least the ESL writer had a personality and probably cared about their job. Those two factors alone dictate that they’d produce better writing than the AI pap we’re starting to see everywhere now. Search engines seem to like it, however, so I suspect it ain’t going anywhere.

So, as I thought about the blog for Phase, I decided no matter what, I would not be focusing on SEO (just to be clear, if you’re a business owner looking to increase traffic, you should focus on SEO). Instead, I’ll be writing about whatever topics in the tech/design/startup worlds I find interesting.

Cheers.