Published: 16th August 2026
Why Minimal Design Matters
As you navigate my site, you will have noticed that my design is purposefully plain, simple and minimalist. This not only mirrors my natural propensity to keep things as simple as possible it also aligns to my belief that over complex design, browser extensions, and a constant barrage of advertising provides no significant benefit to users for a site that’s primary purpose is to share knowledge and information
The practical advantages of simple minimalist design.
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Overuse is easy - With cheap fast technology just a click away it’s easy to start using it everywhere because you can rather than because you should. My default preference is to strip everything back to basics only using additional technologies where and when functional requirements require it.
Performance & Resilience - Designing and coding my own sites negates the reliance on third-party platforms, incompatibilities with plugins and slow performance. Overly complex design and the use of frameworks like WordPress can make resilience and site recovery much more complicated if the need arises. This site is basic HTML only. There is no CSS or JavaScript so backing up is really simple. A couple of compressed directories backed up to another couple of servers using Rsync and that's it.
Agility - Hand coding basic design templates Is easy to do and produces quick results. I can literally write an article or webpage from anywhere. I often use my own hand coded SimplyText web app when I'm on the go. Nothing to install, configure or manage. Fast, Simple and easy.
Compliance - Hand coding sites makes it far easier to comply with standardised language syntax whilst maintaining full cross-browser support and a reliable responsive and predictable experience for users across a varied range of device types.
Time and effort - I don’t have to concern myself with allocating time to system administration maintenance and updating third-party platforms and plugins. Keeping this lean and simple also negates inevitable upgrade and compatibility issues.
Performance - hand-coded HTML web pages load times are way faster than those created by third-party platforms or those heavily laden with additional language libraries. When it comes to the magic of search engine optimisation load times count. Search engines absolutely favour fast loading compliant pages.
Backups & Recovery - the Backup and associated recovery processes are fast, simple and reliable. I have three simple scripts that run daily. One takes care of incremental changes, another whilst another performs a full site backup and copies it offsite while the last one takes care of recovery should it ever be needed. The whole process takes literally seconds to complete and is totally hands off. I get an email notification once a day to confirm that the backups have completed successfully.
Security - Because my site consists of static pages and has no reliance on third-party software or back end server-side protocols database technologies and program languages my security exposure is absolutely minimal. I use just what’s required to provide the functionality needed. Having little in the way of unneeded bloat also keeps the possibility of vulnerabilities to a minimum. The chances of any significant security breaches, virus attacks or hijacking are virtually non-existent. Remember my simple approach means that should the unthinkable happen, it's a mere inconvenience, not a disaster, I can redeploy my sites anywhere at any time within a few minutes via a simple automated process if I should need too.
Portability - Because my site design, content and structure is not reliant upon installing and configuring third-party frameworks, software or systems my sites are completely portable and can be run on any web server anywhere within minutes. This makes freedom, resilience, speed, migration and cost a trivial matter, conditions never to be over estimated.
Compatibility - Minimising requirements, keeping things simple and removing as many superfluous moving parts as possible means I have virtually zero compatibility issues when upgrading servers.
Freedom - A really important aspect of maintaining simple design and requiring minimal technology means I get complete freedom. I’m able to host and run my sites and applications on small, low power low consumption servers
Focus - keeping a complete focus on simplicity and functionality , Allows me to focus on the creation of content. I don’t want to spend hours editing a picture or getting a post thumbnail just right before I can publish an article.That takes valuable time away from creation, slows down page load times and other than providing a slightly more aesthetic appearance provides little tangible value for those of you who consume my content.
Fad Technologies - Technologies, frameworks and languages come and go. I have seen this time and time again over the years, where developers bet the house on the latest and greatest tech only to watch it die on the vine a few short months or years later. So much of the "Trendy" web-stack and associated technologies have been made obsolete over the years but the foundational protocal that's at the core of the web, HTML remains and that's why I stick with it in its most basic form.
Summary
These are just a few of my own personal reasons for hand coding my websites. There are of course many counter augments against my points like convenience, ease of use and extending functionality. I’m certainly not mocking those as relevant considerations for many cases is valid but for most non-commercial sites there are few reasons not to keep it lean and simple. It's worth remembering that convenience and ease of use usually come with a cost attached and the costs, in most cases, is normally freedom of choice, performance and security. That said and a good case in point are my free web apps. I develop free web apps from time to time as hobby projects and for these I simply have to use CSS and JavaScript to make them functionaly, but then that's the point, I only use them when and where I absolutley required.