By Will SP
Date: 11/30/2020

Hello! This is the first real blog entry I am making on this website. So far everything I’ve done has been following the guide created by Ben Stokes on his Tiny Projects site found here. If you want a good guide to dive in head first and just get a website going with minimal effort and minimal outside tool usage then that guide should be your first stepping stone. All I can provide right now are first impressions and some thoughts that I’ve had while trying to figure out the ups and downs of website construction.

First Thoughts and Impressions

So far the best I can say about website development is that it’s really easy if you use an already created format, style, or template. It was ridiculously easy to throw up this website on firebase and get a domain that is acceptable. The hard parts of website development(at least from my myopic position) seems to be setting the right tone of your website while also trying to create content, and not creating any obvious technical debt. There are other challenges that I have no idea about, but so far with just an html and css skeleton I can say these two challenges are what take up the majority of my non-technical mind space.

Tone

What I mean by tone is that it seems like every piece of information on a website is important to creating a mental environment within the user. Thus, it is imperative that due diligence be done to ensure that no incongruities exist to maximize the user’s experience. All the definable parts of the website will work together to create a sum that is greater than their whole. Referring back to Ben Stokes’s Tiny Projects website, you can see all of these elements in action. He uses a simple font, simple structure of the page, simple button for view mode toggling, and even the reading levels are relatively simple, e.g. the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of the website guide is around 7.6 which translates to a seventh grade level.

This is not a flaw, but rather it is a strength that feeds into a general message and tone of the website (simple, straight to the point, and no fluff!). The best analogy I can construct is that it is similar to writing a story. You need to handle technical details such as how long will your chapters be, will you title chapters, what perspective is used, ect. These all can aid in building the right experience for the reader as well as actual writing diction, characterization, plot direction, ect. All of this is to say that being able to visually build a mental narrative inline with what one plans on adding content wise seems to be a key part of building a website that can capture a users attention along with aiding in communication of content.

Future-Proofing

Being able to future-proof a website in both tone and technical structure seems to be an equally hard endeavour. What I figure is that being able to build the proper skeleton of a website file structure, CSS stylesheet, and other items that will be able to grow with both the website and my skills is next to impossible. I figure that failing to future-proof will have two main effects that will comeback to screw me; technical debt that will make any reworking of the site to work with modern frameworks/concepts/practices be insurmountable, and continuously changing up the structure and format of the site as it grows will make establishing a consistent tone rather difficult. I have no idea how to solve this problem, I just know it's going to happen. In short I don’t even have a clue about what I don’t know. If I was an experienced developer, I would probably know way more about what to do, but also I would know what the unknowables were and would have a clue how to mitigate them. But, I’m not an experienced developer so I might as well run head first into the problems and just figure it out later (famous last words).

Planned Tone

What I can make an educated stab at is the general tone I’m going to try and evoke with this website. At its most basic level, I want to try and create a “content first” web experience. Hopefully, inline with some of the old websites I used to browse as a kid that were simple on the formatting and window dressing, but heavy on the content and detail. The blunt kind of tone that a lot of web 1.0 sites used to put off is the kind of tone I want to replicate. This is not to say that I won't make use of the tools and modern frameworks that now permeate the contemporary web, but I don’t want to allow them to infiltrate every nook and cranny of this website. I’m probably just nostalgic and unskilled so the downsides of the old style websites aren’t evident, but will be obvious in retrospect. Nevertheless, I aim on trying to replicate the tone of older web pages.

Why I'm Doing Everything by Scratch

It is the desired tone of simplicity and depth that guided me towards trying to build this website by scratch. When I mean by scratch I refer to just trying to use a text editor to construct the HTML and CSS. When it comes to active elements on the page, I’m going to try and keep them as basic and as homegrown as possible. It seems like there are just absolutely tons of frameworks that can make sites do incredible things, and I want no part of them at all. I’m sure they would make creating things easy, and that's why I want to avoid them. I want to learn the hard way, or at least I think I do.

Future Plans

So all the waxing poetic about the tone of websites aside, I do have some concrete future plans that I hope to complete in either the next week or in the future (TBD). For this next week, the key goal is making this website something that I can put on a resume and not have it lower my chances of getting hired. To that end I plan on creating a semi-well thought out css stylesheet, completing all the main pages already published, cleaning up the jank and typos, and adding in an active element. In short I want to have something basic that isn’t a total embarrassment, so I can start working on other projects. Long term, I want to add some bits and pieces that make my site useful as more than just a personal advertisement: Games, calculators/converters, helpful files, and whatever else I can come up with that is useful to the user. How and what I’m going to do that will fill this niche is beyond me at the moment, but it's something on the TBD list.

Conclusions

So that concludes the first blog post and the halfway report on my first project. If you have comments, questions or feedback, I don’t have a website email or form that you can send to me so just think about them towards me and I might get them.