31 Oct 2024
I enjoy making websites as a hobby, it’s no secret. I design things, I think they look cool, they stay for six months to a few years, I rip it down, I re-design it: the relentless cycle of doing something I love over and over again because I’ve learned a bit more and I want to implement it.
I hold certain philosophies when I make websites though that I try to keep fairly consistent through what I make just as a personal choice. I don’t think that this fits every situation but for what I do which is make static websites for just presenting text and not much else I feel it works well.
While your fast broadband or fibre connection and latest browser version are able to render complex CSS and gradients and flexboxes and inlines, older browsers and those on slower or metered connections may have difficulty with this plus if you’re only using stylesheets that are linked from another file then your user may see a flash of unstyled content which is jarring and could potentially be bad for someone who are photosensitive so we don’t want that.
A good choice for inline CSS is to simply set the body background to a colour that you use as the background on most of your page and the text colour to the text colour you use on most of your page. This limits the changes in styling that may present themselves when things like flexboxes and other CSS features are loaded in and apply themselves so that even on the slowest of connections, the skeleton of your website still functions as intended.
This should be a fairly obvious one but images and videos are heavy beasts who can eat bandwidth like a beaver can block a river. Keeping these to a minimum is good for anyone on any connection but especially metered ones which somehow are still around in the domestic internet industry in present day. Alt text is also crucial for both accessibility purposes but so that people who turn off multimedia aren’t in the dark.
Preferably, there’s no JavaScript, no animations, no overly complex stylesheets that only support browser versions that released in the last year or six months or whatever. Keep it simple.
If your website uses a disproportionate amount of system resources in comparison to what it actually presents, people on weaker systems may just move on because your resume site makes their PC crawl to a halt and if you think this doesn’t matter, go out and buy a sub 100£ laptop that comes with a Celeron or a Pentium or an Intel “Processor” that doesn’t have any specific branding and go to your website. If it runs like shit, you’re doing it wrong.
Also no JavaScript and no overly complex features or animations are good for people with accessibility requirements. Your website can easily be switched up by extensions like Dark Reader by people who need them and no animations means you don’t have to worry about people who have reduced motion on.
All-in-all, I don’t believe everyone should follow these philosophies. They're not essential nor do they fit every use case but I feel that for people’s personal websites, we should be normalising people who have accessibility needs and people who have financial difficulties and cannot afford the latest overcompensator hardware: nobody should be locked out from the personal web.