One of my favorite websites is motherfuckingwebsite.com.

It’s a great commentary on design, and how we can very quickly start overdesigning solutions when the simple ones work. There is something delightful about a website being true to the form of an informative, accessible HTML Web Document, and maybe that is all that’s needed. No need to be responsive if you are a single text document. Buttons do not need to be anything fancy, and can just load a new page without destroying the back button. Plus, what’s the point in building a single page application if the effort to load your next component is heavier than just a new document? The biggest argument against this motherfucking website is styling and User Experience, and I think it’s arguable that simple and plain design does not ruin a user’s experience, necessarily. It largely depends on the purpose, and for, say, maintaining a blog, or providing some quickly digestible information, this can work great. There’s another site,bettermotherfuckingwebsite, that also addresses all these issues of design and readability to show that there is a middle ground, where your site stays terse but isn’t a brutalist architect’s wet dream.

From a developer standpoint, it makes a lot of hilarious (but true) points, but the most interesting point of all is towards the end:

I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

And I hate to say it, but I am that son-of-a-bitch way too often. Take, for example, this entire site. It’s large and unnecessarily so when the only thing it needs is some HTML docs, and maybe a few lines of CSS Stylings. Right now, as I try and re-install all the tools needed to rebuild this monstrosity of a site, I’ve come to hate it. there is no reason a static site like this should be this big. One of my goals this year will be to build this from scratch and create my own tooling to maintain something akin to a web 1.0 (maybe somewhere in between 1 and 2) blog site. This way I can par down on this unneeded paff and be more familiar with all the tools that I’m using. I imagine it might bring some pain back of hand-building HTML objects, but what’s worse, the laborious effort for a small feeling of success, or no effort, for something you don’t love at all?