Making little webpages is an artform

Posted on: 03 Aug 2026
tags: html, coding

For a long time I have been the kind of person who felt the need to make pet project websites look good, with CSS and JS and a light and dark mode, blah blah. When I put together a functional homepage for my indieweb page, it took me a week to fine-tune all the annoying ways in which the CSS interacted with each other - flexboxes, grids, tables and resizable views.

I've leaned towards enforcing a minimum display size so that I can make designs that will always look the same. That adds a lot of overhead to my design where I have to adjust how things are aligned on an offset-by-single-digits-of-pixels basis. It was nice to look at, but really, really annoying to try to code as a casual self-taught kind of developer.

When I put together my latest project (which is mostly just a readable front-end to a cloudflare _redirects file), I didn't bother with styling. I figure that those who want dark mode already have a dark-conversion extension. So I just made the content and surprisingly, what I thought would take me a few days ended up coming together in an evening (and it was 75% just installing a bunch of browsers to get the help articles correct).

Putting aside that I was able to focus (another surprise) and just get it all out there, it felt nice to make something plain, too. I've seen many a page on Neocities or Nekoweb that forgo fancy stylesheets and imported fonts and weighty libraries and just put pen to paper. I admired them because I felt like I couldn't make it that simple. I wanted the personality in my pages to appear through the styles and colour choices I made.

Looking back on all the iterations of my homepages I've gone through and trashed, I see that I was compensating for a lack of skill and a lack of anything to put on them by excessively styling them. Obviously this isn't a knock against people who do style their webpages. I still do, and many pages are beautiful. I love the easter eggs people put into their personal pages.

tl;dr - i'm feeling happy because i put function over form and it actually worked out.

Director's Cut (02 Nov 2026)

In this post, I'm referring to searchdot without just self-advertising. This post is also now outdated since the site no longer works this way, but it applied at the time. When I made searchdot, home 10 hadn't existed yet.

It makes me look a little unaware of myself to read the post back now, while you're reading it on this page, with its iframes, heavy styling, and the much loved clock in the background, but I think I'm doing OK.