I am so tired of building websites. If you google "build website" you get over 400 million results. Most are links to tools like Webflow, or a listicle explaining the top 10 static site generators this year. Static site generators are great! Oh, but you should know something about Nunjucks and also maybe templating languages if you want a blog and maybe while you're at it build some kind of Jamstack website? I am a frontend developer by trade and let me tell you **I am so damn tired of building these kinds of websites.** Yesterday I tried adding something to my portfolio website. It was a simple feature. But instead, I spent three hours battling with my `rollup.config.js` and my `package.json` and some other bullshit. When did building a website become so dumb? I have used Vue and Svelte and Eleventy and **so many frameworks** I have lost track. Every single one I end up battling with something in the build process, or I can't install a package I want to use, etc. etc. Listen if someone is paying me to debug code and wrestle with Webpack or whatever, cool. But **I'm so tired of wasting my non-work time battling with software I didn't write.** I want the work I produce on my own time to be *about the work*. I want to create, to experiment, to make weird shit that strikes me on a whim. So I built this website. I'm trying a new thing where my website will only be HTML/CSS and Javascript. No framework. No site generator. Just a bunch of HTML pages. There's something satisfying about writing code the browser will interpret *literally* rather than a compiled version. ## Built by humans for humans The thing with frameworks is, despite their whizziness, there is so much you **do not need**. Modern websites (social media, shopping, news sites, etc.) were built for advertisements, for data tracking, for *content creation* whatever that means. I'd like the web to be weird and personal again. Sometimes no design is the best design. My new website will follow these requirements: - [WCAG accessible](https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) - shockingly fast and small - responsive on all sizes and browsers - technology agnostic That's it. Nothing will be over-engineered. Using [the motherfucking website](https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) as my personal mantra, I'm going to keep styling to the bare minimum. But I'll include more images and visuals to show some work. I'll continue to use my notepad as a place to dump my thoughts, but instead of using some hacked together Node package that reads `.md` files and inserts them into a template, I'm using [Showdown.js](https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown). Plain old HTML with a client-side Markdown converter for easy writing. Using this approach I hope to make more one-off pages that can be ported over easily, say, from Glitch or OpenProcessing or some other site where I started writing the code first. And most importantly, I hope to spend more time making things rather than battling the hottest new Javascript thing.