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Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting. Every website redesign begins with inspiration. For this one, there were two: Anders' clean, readable website, which inspired the homepage, and Marijn's site, which reminded me just how fun the web can be. 2020 made me nostalgic of the web of the late 90s and early 2000s that I grew up with. Some of you might have read my previous article, Against an Increasingly User Hostile Web. In it, I argue that we are replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditises people. I talk about how the modern web of surveillance, bloat and walled gardens is at odds with the open web that I love.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much the sentiment seemed to be shared by so many other people who emailed me, wrote responses on their own blog and discussed it on online forums. Despite being two and a half years old, that article rather disappointingly still reflects the state of the web today. But stumbling upon Marijn’s site gave me hope. It led me down a rabbit hole of many other small websites made by people with all kinds of interests: movies, aviation, music, art, computers. It reminded me that the creative, personal, fun web I grew up with is not a thing of the past. It’s still here in 2020. You just have to know where to look. My aim is not to convince you that everything was better in the past; it wasn't. You had trojans, malware, endless pop-ups, terrible security practices, browser incompatibility, slow Java applets. No, technically, the modern web is more secure and more usable.
This essay is my attempt to show you what the small and independent web can look like, why it’s different from the the sites that dominate web traffic today, why it's worth exploring and how easy it is for anyone to be a part of it. On my homepage, I mention that this website is “a tribute to the creative web of the 90s”. This is not simply because this website has animated gifs and a guestbook. The way I built it is also inspired by how I built my earliest websites: everything is written in plain HTML. No content management systems, no generators, no templates, no themes, no plugins. Just plain markup and styling, the most basic of the basic building blocks of the web. I didn’t originally plan to do it like this. I previously used a static site generator to output plain HTML and was simply working on a new design template for that.
But my three-year-old node.js setup was now spewing error messages, telling me some dependencies had to be updated and that a plugin was no longer compatible. Because I'm lazy and didn't want to fix any of that, I wondered if I couldn’t just do it all manually instead and save myself the trouble. So I did. I decided to hand-code everything in plain HTML and CSS, manually link all the pages and even hand-write the RSS feed. This approach wouldn't work for a bigger website. But for a small one like mine with about 10 total pages, it has many obvious benefits: next to no dependencies, easy to maintain, reasonably future proof, easily portable and most important of all, terribly fun to work on. I stayed up till six in the morning for two straight days working on the redesign, not because I couldn’t sleep but because I didn’t want to stop. Redesigning my website this way inspired me to scour archives of old websites for interesting relics from the early web.
This in turned led me to the fun, creative websites that are actively maintained even today. To understand what these small websites represent and why I think they are important, we need to start in the past. The web was still in its infancy in the early 90s. You probably know the story. It had only just been invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 and released into the public domain in 1993, making it available for free to anyone in the world to use and build on. In its very early days, it was really only accessible to the more technical crowd, much like Gopher, FTP, Usenet and other internet protocols at the time. It wasn't until the first easy-to-use graphical browser Mosaic was released for free in 1993 that regular computer users would discover the web for the first time. Others like myself discovered it later still when the Mosaic-spinoff Netscape Navigator (the foundation of today's Firefox) and Internet Explorer became commonplace.
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