My website is ugly because I made it

Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.

For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?

It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.

I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?

The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason.

I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.

There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid.

At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format.

Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.

Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention.

Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.

I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way.

We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.

His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist.

NOW its ugly.

Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.

I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only

Maybe apache or nginx as webservers

host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier

I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.

Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.

It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the page.

Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site is weird in its own way. I’ll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!

> It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you.

Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.

The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e. click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose.

I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D

I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.

I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the previous owners.

There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing.

I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes.

In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.

Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves, but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't have to mean ugly...

But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...

This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.

I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.

I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100% handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp. Hopefully it is not too ugly!

Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control.

I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website.

I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it.

Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content.

[1] https://susam.net/

[2] https://susam.net/colophon.html

[3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp

I remember when 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' by Kendrik Lamar was out on 05/22 and I was thinking to my self, OMG it's only May and the best album of the year is out.

The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank you for that.

Well, if your website content is not very static, your website will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me" aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site generation mechanism.

Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\

You don't know ugly. Your site is fine!

I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors. This was the result: <https://wpollock.com/>.

I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I guess.

The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet that don't want to conform.

I just use WordPress, with slightly-modified themes. I make sure they load quickly, and work on phones.

Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.

Inspiring for me to see this, I have yet to make my own website.

That line ugly because I made it really hit me. So many websites today look clean and polished and perfect, but you can't really tell who made them.

This one is a bit messy, but it feels personal. Like someone is using CSS to write a diary. Not perfect, but warm and alive. That feeling of making something just for yourself really means something.

My website is pretty because I made it. Or at least it is to my tastes, I'm sure someone else would tell me otherwise.

The author of this article's site is taylor.town, not the site the article was posted on. For what it's worth taylor town looks nice enough to me. Actually a lot nicer than the goodinternetmagazine site hosting this article...

That’s also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on your behalf.

We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.

Reminds me of a home I was interested in buying. Shades of grey, everywhere. White marble counter tops, of course. Very sterile.

Nothing wrong with it. It’s a choice. But does scream "millennial aesthetic". Maybe that’s what caused the vitriol that spurred this blog post

It was good and minimal before, now it's all form and no function (no dates, no ordering of posts).

Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything. Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it?

(The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership, hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)

Barry Kauler’s website uses a CMS that’s a static generator using SeaMonkey as the wysiwyg component:

https://bkhome.org/shellcms/

It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.

I have a personal site with a bootstrap and ScalaJS-react frontend and I regret it massively. 'Old fashioned' server side templating (e.g. JSP) would have been a way better choice.

Aesthetic and trends are part of it, I think it looks purely

I feel like we're heading to Japanese style websites in the near future.

New website gives me headaches. The one before was much better.

Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool. Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site and letting it actually perform well without making my CPU sad.

That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image. There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah.

Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making things that are different!

Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that lights up when you hover over a link.

Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread are claiming.

i'm actually fascinated because the website made me slightly nauseous

I genuinely find it beautiful

Static generation. Tables. End of story.

lol,yes

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Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.