Building Websites in 2024 Really Can Be This Simple

Don’t worry, this isn’t a pitch for an AI-powered website generator. Rather, it’s an appeal to my fellow developers, some of whom have read my previous posts against unnecessarily complicated website design and development.

A client was recently lamenting the look of one of their websites. Since I was already moving it to a new server, I chanced a look to see if there was anything I could do relatively quickly to improve the website. Turns out, the original developer had built it with Microsoft FrontPage — developers of a certain age will undoubtedly have suppressed a shudder upon seeing those cursed words — and not surprisingly, it was a total mess.

Design-wise, the website’s pages were broken and inconsistent. Code-wise, the HTML was a jumble of <font> tags, nested tables, proprietary Microsoft code, and even a <marquee> or three. My coding OCD immediately kicked in, and I spent a few hours cleaning up and modernizing the HTML. Some good ol’ find-and-replace took care of the <font> tags and Microsoft code, but there was still quite a bit of code-wrangling as I brought the website, kicking and screaming, into the Year of our Lord 2024.

Doing so reminded me of one of my first web-related jobs out of college, which was updating the local hockey team’s website. This was circa 1999, years before CMS tools like WordPress were really a thing. Every week, I spent several hours exporting and HTML-izing spreadsheets full of player and game data and uploading it to the website via FTP. Such a process might seem really tedious, but this time around, it was actually fun to bring order out of the FrontPage-generated chaos. It was a refreshing change of pace from what I typically do these days, and it reminded me of the beauty of simple, well-formed HTML and CSS.

Five years ago, I probably would’ve insisted on rebuilding my client’s website on a CMS, a multi-step process that usually includes verifying server requirements, setting up a database, installing and configuring the CMS, copying and pasting the website’s content into the CMS, building out the front-end templates, and so on. That would be total overkill, however. The website is small, containing less than 30 pages, and its content is nothing fancy, nor does it contain any dynamic functionality (e.g., blogging, e-commerce); it’s the very definition of a static website.

While I did use PHP “includes” for global elements (e.g., the website’s header and footer) in order to streamline the code and make it easier to manage, there’s nothing special — from a technical standpoint, that is — about the website. And that’s OK. Not every website needs to run on a CMS, implement a build process, or use a CSS or JavaScript framework.

Those things certainly have their place. Still, it’s worth remembering that they’re not necessary for building websites in 2024, and could even be a liability. For a website like my client’s, logging into a CMS to make a text update might prove more time-consuming than just updating the actual HTML via FTP like it was 1999. (With apologies to Prince.)