Making little webpages is an artform

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.