Some people speak of digital gardens, linklogs and personal wikis. Of how to bring back a Geocities-era web without the baggage. Other people instead prattle about profiles, feeds and mentions. Choose wisely.
Essays
- Just another website
- thoughts about the state of web design and how we can reclaim it
- Notes on the small web
- (and web-adjacent technologies)
- RSS feeds and how to tame them
- an introduction that explains the what and why too, not just where to click
Not quite a manifesto:
Pro tips
It's not my first time saying this, but thoughts like to circle back now and then.
I've been a pro web developer for 15 years before burning out of the industry. If you're a small business or NGO looking to set up an online presence, please listen to me.
Don't hire an agency to make you a fancy, best-practices website. Find an old fashioned webmaster who can craft one for you and then keep working on it. Not frame it and put it on a shelf.
You can still have a blog, wiki, forum and so on tacked on top. In fact they should be extras! But for the love of everything sacred: make them janky. Not pixel-perfect and branded to death. Worry about community and moderation instead.
I've been doing web design for a while and watched other people do it, too. You can't really separate written copy from presentation. The best page layouts are designed around specific text. Conversely, any given layout only has room for certain kinds of text. If you design it for Lorem Ipsum, anything else is going to look horrible in there.
Speaking of which, if your landing page looks like Every Bootstrap Website, I'm not going to spend much time on it. You'd be surprised how often I stumble upon one of those, and they all slow my browser to a crawl without even saying much of interest.
Fancy layouts appear designed to fill the space with a big wad of nothing. You can do that more cheaply if you simply bump the font size up a notch. At least it will help aging readers. There are more of us than you think.