💾 Archived View for denisthiessen.de › blog › why-not-simple captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:37:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Hey.
Hope you are doing well right now. 😁
You see... Last time around I've been talking about smaller more unknown and simplistic web-protocols and their niche uses.
In there I've been also talking about a lighter more comfortable reading experiences without too much bloat.
But this isn't really a concept that cannot be achieved within our classic webpages and there are a lot of webpages around which make a lot with little. (Including this one... 😉)
Those are just mainly experiences where the entire thing is based around those aspects but in actuality you cannot use it in your day to day life.
I don't really have to tell you that in the vast world of the world-wide web there is a lot of annoying stuff around, a lot of bloat, a lot of useless features.
Everyone that has spent at least some time in the internet has experienced this and I would be even willing to bet money for that one. 😅
And to be honest. It's annoying. It's tiring.
As someone who works in the IT industry those things cannot be really changed that easily.
There are a lot of people who make these design decisions who then say... Okay we need to embed these popup-videos or these ultra-high res video or this absolute chonker of a JavaScript library and it looks great on my machine with my 10 Gigabit connection with 64 gigs of RAM.
Then there are also those people focused on analytics and want to get every piece of analytics data around for whatever reason with their tracking tools and millions of cookies.
As I said. This trend is really tiring even though in the business side little can be changed in the end.
People want to make their money or don't really know better or "have to follow" certain decisions and this is just annoying.
I mean. Isn't it a really great user experience to enter a website which already has 3 MB of data to load and then loads in several video popups, cookie banners, ad-blocking notices and registration forms.
I just want to read that damn thing. Please don't make that so hard for me.
But the crazy thing is that this bloat increases more and more into personal pages which is a thing that can at least be changed somewhat reasonably.
With everything becoming more and more accessible by combining several things together it also increases the bloat.
It's a really tricky one because I don't really want to restrict creating in this wonderful place that we call the internet.
But I think you can understand me that this is straight up annoying.
As you might have noticed my little page is kinda fast when it comes to loading since it is pretty simple and doesn't really use that many resources.
But I also did some tinkering with a static site generator to make this place my own and make it work for me.
I can imagine that this isn't really a solution for a non tech-savy person.
The crazy thing is that there are a lot of different lesser known tools around which do a pretty simple website generation where in the end you just enter your text of the webpage content.
People do not really feel satisfied generally with that "simple" of a thing around when there's a lot of crazy stuff around but it doesn't have to be this way I feel.
In my opinion the main thing should be the content of a webpage.
It's basically the reason why we are on the web. The content.
The rest is basically for making the content more accessible/readable or less accessible in most cases since the more simple websites tend to be more accessible in most of the times thanks to all of those extra components which aren't "accessible" out of the box.
But that is a topic for another day.
So I've been talking about my feelings and thoughts for a while now.
What are the ways of getting to a more simple way?
Because to be honest. Not everyone lives in a city with a great internet connection. Not everyone has a great computer which can load things quickly. Generally not everyone has the means to traverse this more and more bloated web we are currently experiencing.
So how can we change this?
So first of all.
Be aware what you want and what you need to use.
A webpage isn't a simple thing that you can just make.
You need to be aware what you want to do on it. If you aren't you might as well not make it. 😅
And if you think about that think about the best way you can achieve this.
In a lot of the cases a static site generator is more than enough for most cases.
And theses sites don't really have to be ugly even if you like more elaborated things.
In most of the cases it's just a case of theming.
When you do something like this then you can have a simple (in most cases accessible, since it uses plain HTML/CSS elements) and quick site which can look pretty.
Another thing is about the third-party elements that you use.
Do you really need that 5000th analytics element?
Do you really need that other JavaScript library?
Turns out in more cases than not the answer is no.
And there are more advantages to that approach than speed. Ever noticed how this website doesn't use any cookie banner for example?
You don't need those for when you only use technically necessary cookies for certain features. 😉
Just a little other example why it can be sensible.
There are a lot more different things that you can do to make it more optimised. And you don't really have to take it that far as I do.
I'm a big nerd and I like doing stuff like this. But most people don't.
For most people it's a way to do something and they need to do it like that and this is completely fine.
You don't have to be radical about those things.
It's not really good for everyone including you.
The only thing that I want you to take away from this overly lengthy blog post is to think about what you use and how you use your elements in your webpage.
It can make even your life easier maintaining everything.
It's easier for all of those different people who don't use 100% optimal devices like you maybe.
It's a lot quicker and in most of the times more accessible.
And it makes the lives of everyone easier when traversing our pretty bloated web and make your place look like a little oasis of simplicity.
It just straight up works.
So think before you make.
It makes everything for all of us simpler.
And most importantly also have some fun making.
Don't forget that in the mess of everything else around.
See ya. 👋