)
You may be thinking, "but Helios, where can I put my gorgeous 2MB transparent spinning dolphin gif now?? What about my star tiled gif background?!" And trust me, I used to think that too.
But think about it. What do shiny things on your website do? They pull the attention. They distract readers from your content.
Of course, that's great if you're building a visual site, but a percentage of your readers attention gets stolen by your Keanu Reeves banner.
Do you want people to care about your content? To attentively read your stuff?
We all know it. We've all been talking about it. Its been a thing for ages.Social media has been killing our attention span. TikTok seems to have only worsened it, what with the new content every ten seconds, effectively chaining you to the app.
We need to rebuild our attention span. When was the last time you read 20 pages of a book in a row? When was the last time you read an entire text only article? Without skimming?
Social media makes content easier to consume. "Ah, don't worry about it. Just sit back, we'll spoon-feed you everything you need". Don't contain me! Don't hold me down! I am a hungry bear! I am the king of my forest! I shall scavenge and search for my own food!
If I want to read about someone's hiking trip, or how to remove stamps for a letter, why am I subjected to a million ads, cookies, overload of GIFs, eyestrain colours? What about me just being interested in the content itself?
We get it. You can make cool visually stunning websites. So can I! And now what.
You want a personal website, but you also need people to believe you have artistic ability. Why!
Stop putting emphases on visual elements of a website, instead of focusing on it having interesting fun content.
You don't need to have the most interesting beautiful website to be worth of attention.
By choosing to not care about visual elements, you're eliminating the competition aspect. Now, you can breathe out and just focus on your content.
So, now you have a basic HTML page, and now you have to.. write?! Oh dear!
Don't fret. It's okay if you're not good at writing, it's okay if you're also good at writing. By just writing, you'll be improving anyways.
And before you know it, you'll have found your writing voice! You will look back over years and then notice how much you've changed.
Now I'm not saying every website should look like this. Instead, I advocate for visual websites to be treated as creative processes, and written websites for delivering content. Because getting content should be easy and accessible.
Also, I'm just being overly dramatic. I just chose this format because it works better for me! No shame in doing whatever you want to do. My only advice would be to commit to whatever you choose to do, because there are way too many gorgeous websites with no updates/left to die. (And also I seriously just want there to be more No CSS websites).(Also I am aware this is the only No CSS page on my website.