It's the backlinks that allow it to rank. Getting them requires a lot of knowledge & work, like publishing articles on Medium or receiving links on HN.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like the creator is an SEO-expert with years of experience and dozens of projects.
When it comes to Weird Niche Sites, the co-hosts really capture the weirdness of the web. Spencer reveals his ‘90s-looking website, Disk Prices[link to the site], which is essentially a list of hard drive prices and their different characteristics.
It is a good site and I've used it before to purchase a drive or two.
However... What I've found is that it is not always 100% accurate and if you really want the cheapest TB/$ (and you can wait) you should be setting up alerts on slickdeals or another deal website.
As a data hoarder, I try to just wait for deals and not use this site.
The other thing is that they consistently allow MDD / Max Disk Deals or whatever their name is to occupy the New disk listings, despite every Amazon review of them being full of "this disk is lightly used". So if you're buying new disks, avoid that whole vendor.
There are only three vendors of hard disks: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. (HGST used to be a fourth, but they're now WD.) Anyone else is a shady refurbisher to be avoided.
Diskpriced has a lot of organic popularity because it actually is extremely useful. The lesson here has nothing to do with UI design. There is real value in aggregating, cleaning, and providing structured access to information that helps people make decisions.
I'm looking for disks and this is exactly a tool I'd like to have, bookmarking this one. If this is an SEO play, good job. If all SEO linked to treasure, it wouldn't be so reviled.
I dislike these lines of thinking, because they seem based on conspiratorial thinking. Our imagination lets us always think something is lurking, something is deeper & scarier than we imagine.
This site is popular because it's organic & good & a fine service, one without peer or equal. It asks nothing of the user, and helps them make good informed decisions effectively.
Imagining there's some secret agenda is all too popular in way too many areas in the world. Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD) can have some basis, but letting it get in the way, letting it obstruct or out shadow simple good as it comes lets us miss out on understanding value and positivity, and with those basis undermined we (society) are screwed.
All business sans the most basic is based on schemes, theatre, magic.
It’s way more fantastical to believe in some supreme meritocracy.
Off course a good chunk is based on talent but the “there’s no conspiracies” seem like libertarian propaganda to me after a life in business where politics, marketing, law and nepotism were the real lessons.
The world actually runs on conspiracies - that’s how the human social mind works.
People mention other products where that might work. So yes, jump in.
The issue with sites like this, I feel, is staying power. Even with some reasonable SEO awareness and legitimate presence on the corresponding technical forums, it still takes years to accumulate links (but perhaps mostly bookmarks) to your product discovery site. Including organic HN mentions - if that's the right audience. Same for any other old-style web site. And people want a quick buck. So that they get impatient and give up the entire thing, or they give up mentioning the site in the right places. Or so that they sell ads or product placement - which then kills the organic effort.
Product discovery in general is a mess. It's not a particularly high bar you have to pass in order to build something that's better than your average online storefront when it comes to product search and comparison.
Jeans are probably top 3 worst products to shop for.
Mens sizes are literal measurements in inches, ostensibly. However when you look at the sizing chart on brand websites you realize they all have varying levels of vanity sizing - across brands, across fits within a brand, and across years within a fit.
Then you have all the confusing nomenclature for fits - skinny, slim, straight, classic, standard, relaxed, boot cut, baggy, flare, athletic, etc.. And then hybrid ones like "slim straight" or other nonsense. Finally, some brands offer different inseams/lenghts for a given waist, while others have fixed ones per waist size so you have to get them tailored after, etc.
The shopping experience for me in jeans is to trying multiple brands/fits/sizes every 5+ years, and then keep buying that exact model until it is no long available, then reset.
Also if you've ever done a deeper analysis of Lucky jeans, the same exact model is wildly different depending on where it got produced. Different material composition, fit, flexibility/softness (due to the difference in materials), different country it was produced in (and IIRC, it's not even consistent. Mexico is not always 100% cotton for example. There was no discernible pattern)
I try to find products I like and then buy a bunch of them (in case they stop making them, etc) and I wound up making a spreadsheet once after becoming frustrated with the inability to trust the same "model number" means the same thing there.
Unfortunately, it doesn't let you filter by aspect ratio, so you cannot get e.g. all 16:10 monitors which is something I'm always actively searching for and it's so difficult. The page also doesn't list the unique Dell U3023E and its predecessors which are 2560x1600, i.e. 16:10 monitors, and perfect for design & development both in portrait and landscape mode.
If the developer of that website is on HN, I hope they can add a filter for aspect ratio and more 16:10 monitors as well.
It is, it was very useful in narrowing down exactly what I wanted (how Amazon fails to provide decent filtering is beyond me) but it doesn't work well on mobile which is a shame.
I don't understand Amazon either. They actively neuter their filtering and sorting. Obviously they think they make more money that way, but it is an absolutely insane choice to make if you have any self-respect.
2024. Everything is slow. Search doesn't work. Ad infestation is even more invasive than the popup spawning days of old. Product quality is rock bottom. We have done ourselves in. But it's no wonder third party sites with basic functions are on the rise.
Newegg is still decent. The actual product selection isn't the best nowadays, but the search interface mostly still works, and they aren't shoving ads in your face.
Can anyone specify how the author approached this with respect to SEO. Paying for backlinks is tough, and writing your own articles seems tedious. Any hidden tactics in use perhaps?
How's writing articles tedious in the era of large language models? I'm not a SEO expert, far from it, but for my understanding you can just rewrite any article out there by having an AI focusing on specific keywords. Rinse and repeat.
I know the HN hivemind despises white space and padding and medium width paragraphs and deem them unneccessary and atrocious for some reason, but the design on the site is not that "functional" - on a window with width of 1035px or less, the main table moves all the way down below the filter column - I can imagine someone opening this with a tablet or something like that for the first time wondering where are all the articles until they scroll all the way down.
It works fine in landscape orientation on an iPhone SE if you zoom out to 50%.
I prefer to view websites like this as if my phone was a desktop, and I tend to hate it when that desire is fought by aggressive attempts to reflow everything into a “mobile” format with no way around it. So I think it’s better than many modern websites as far as usability goes.
I think everyone but me is wrong and that my phone in portrait mode should be able to show at least 100 characters. The comment im replying takes up about an inch of vertical space, and is spread over six lines, one of which is blank and one is a single word.
This is larger than I find ideal but about the same as an average paperback novel. That said I need to twiddle a setting in Android developer options to get even this small. Maybe people want to loom at their phone without their glasses on? maybe less text seems "cleaner"?
I’m sorry but I’m just not going to switch off my orientation lock and turn my phone sideways just for a website to “work fine”. It’s 2024. I expect better
There's a lot of content you're just not going to be able to partake in then. Tables with more than 3 columns more or less just don't work in portrait mode.
Real pixels and css pixels aren't the same thing. As far as the website is concerned, the viewport is usually something like 400x900 even on the most expensive ultra mega hi res phone.
You’re obviously correct. It’s odd, I haven’t dealt with CSS in long enough I’ve completely forgotten about that or perhaps like many CSS issues I have completely blocked it out.
Exactly my point as well when I went to the site. Fast, click here, uncheck there, kaboom, instant change. No gazillion nested divs, precisely to the point of what it says it does. I guess Peter Voica, the article's author, cannot comprehend pages without having blank spaces at edges.
If you really want to learn good modern UI design from a business perspective, you need to look at websites that absolutely need to retain users and depend on high conversions to survive.
Example: Stake.com. Somehow manages to show a ton of information without feeling slow or sluggish. Isn’t pretty but has basic respect for legibility and whitespace.
> He created a website that looks like it was made in HTML with total disrespect for the user experience
I find that the filtering on diskprices.com works way faster than the typical search filters on Newegg, Canada Computers, and pretty much every e-commerce site I've ever used.
Disk Prices is definitely respecting my user experience by being snappy and not wasting CPU cycles and network round trips.
This is what happens when a web site, or any business, is actually useful for visitors. Too many sites now only focus on selling someone else's product through marketing. This site focuses on being helpful.
It means everyone is already trying to be helpful/useful. It's like telling someone who is struggling with dating to just be themselves. Not useful or actionable advice.
Look, I'm no businessman, but clearly if you manage to attract the right audience and find a way to get paid, you make money.
People asking for disk prices probably have looser standards in terms of UX. That's why it works. Backlinks and an audience who actually doesn't care about UX that much. Doing the same stuff in the fashion industry may not work.
> People asking for disk prices probably have looser standards in terms of UX.
Perhaps the opposite is true. A site like this works because Amazon is poor at finding products, never mind for comparing prices. Even e-commerce sites that filter data in a similar manner (and typically do a better job since they have more complete product details), this site is both faster and makes product comparisons easier.
While it is probably possible to tweak to UX to make it better, I would suggest the success of this site is due to providing a better UX for its target audience.
I mean from an aesthetic standpoint. People interested in disk details and prices may not care that much about material design, responsiveness and carousel with disk pictures. They want to get what they want.
For that kind of audience, the simple UX of that website is attractive enough.
This site has an outstanding UX for its audience and users. This audience cares about UX. They/ we are not shy to tell you that most current web site's user experience sucks. So it's not a question of "looser standards". On the contrary it's a question of paying attention to your users.
I'm a bit surprised Amazon allowed this page to do affiliate marketing like this. I had a similar page but much more generalized to laptops and they told me my site had to have some other content: it couldn't just exist to promote the amazon products. If they've changed their stance on this then great!
Chances are he had a blog or something with content/pages and got approved. Then just re-used the codes/keys for the affiliate links on this new site. Once you start making money Amazon doesn't care.
Source: Me. I had a comparison tool for products with similar layout to this. They originally denied it citing 'lack of content'. Made a 2nd website with some blogs/reviews, it was approved. Re-used the code/api for the comparison tool and closed the other website. They haven't complained in 12 years.
This has "content". The filters and columns are different to those offered by Amazon's own search experience (the $/TB, for example). Did your laptop selection site just replicate the data from Amazon, or did it try and do something novel?
"Content" is not alway descriptions, reviews and the like. It can be aggregation, statistical and calculated.
>Did your laptop selection site just replicate the data from Amazon, or did it try and do something novel?
I thought it was novel. It was basically a guided questionnaire that asked you about your needs and price point and then spit out a laptop recommendation at the end
> The following marketplaces have threatened or suspended our accounts and are unlikely to return to diskprices.com without clear policy changes from Amazon: amazon.jp, amazon.nl, amazon.it, amazon.sg.
That wasn't the issue I had at the time. I had the required disclaimers but they still rejected me because the sole purpose of my site was to sell their products.
Honestly that site has great UX/UI. Mobile view could be improved but it doesn’t have any distractions and a clear user interface with all the relevant information, so it’s ahead of most over designed “beautiful” websites.
This site is a good example of a simple, ethical affilate marketing site.
Of course, as other posters have alluded to, setting up a site like this does not just involve creating the web page itself -- it also necessarily would involve SEO and backlinks, etc., etc.
Again, as other posters have alluded to.
But that being said -- this web page still ranks pretty high in my book for simplicity (and elegance from that simplicity), in a money-making website.
It could be argued, successfully, that any website these days, any website at all -- would need visitors -- and if those visitors aren't coming from social media and/or Google ads -- then getting visitors there would necessarily have to involve SEO and backlinks.
Unless of course, you have some other creative and/or good way to get visitors to your website...
So, an excellent example of what a simple website can do -- if, if and only if you can solve the problem of getting visitors to your website, by one or more ways...
This author specifically and intentionally put this piece behind the paywall. There's no reason to worry about your blog posts on Medium being behind a paywall unless you did the same.
I assume this is using some kind of amazon pricing API under the hood. Does anyone know how to get access to that kind of API without already being a successful affiliate?
Interesting that this site makes money despite pcpartpicker existing. Gives me hope that there are a bunch of opportunities to build something like this for other hobbies.
This is interesting to me because I recently made a website for a niche type of product and was denied Amazon Affiliate.
“We want an associate site to be one that adds value to the customer by giving them insight on a subject or product they might not get easily.”
Listing all of the products available (Amazon and elsewhere) in one place (there are like 20 total ) so a shopper could compare features seemed liked it would suffice.
Perhaps I should reformat the website to be like Diskprices and try again.
I don't think all that info is available via Amazon's API so the site owner must be scraping Amazon page listings. Surely this isn't allowed? What am I missing?
The few words far down the sidebar don't comply with either Amazon or FTC affiliate disclosure requirements. They may have complied when the owner built the site, which appears to have been decades ago.
Yet another example that being "ugly" has little impact on utility. This looks right in line (if on a smaller scale) with the masterpiece that is McMaster-Carr https://mcmaster.com/
What I really like is the solidity of the whole website. Like things don't shift around and move around. There is no JavaScript moving the element when I'm trying to click on it. No fonts loading with a flash after I already see stuff on the page. Once I see it, it's there for me to click it if I choose to and that gives me a whole lot of trust and faith in the website.
Brilliant, the site does what I do myself every time I research something to buy. Basically a spreadsheet, where I gather all the data points myself, it's tiresome. Capitalism to work, it's supposed to be done by rational agents. This removes all the emotionality from choosing a product.
I don't know what's going on here but Amazon normally shuts stuff like this down in 1 second because you're not allowed to make "affiliate sites with no other content" like much of this space.
Really not applicable for anyone else than this dude.
It's the backlinks that allow it to rank. Getting them requires a lot of knowledge & work, like publishing articles on Medium or receiving links on HN.
Unsurprisingly, it looks like the creator is an SEO-expert with years of experience and dozens of projects.