A Minimal Website Experiment

Goal

Before starting the archive project, I ran a smaller test: build a single-page personal site with no JavaScript at all, and see how far plain HTML and CSS could carry a real, usable page.

What I built

A one-page introduction with a short bio, a list of links, and a contact method — styled entirely with CSS, no scripts, no build tools. The whole thing was under ten kilobytes.

Result

It worked better than expected. Load times were effectively instant, it needed no maintenance once published, and it rendered correctly everywhere I tested it without a single compatibility fix. The constraints turned out to be clarifying rather than limiting.

Lessons learned

This experiment is what convinced me to build the larger archive as a static site rather than reaching for a framework by default. A small amount of hand-written HTML, done carefully, outperformed my expectations on every axis that actually mattered for a personal project: speed, durability, and how easy it was to change my mind later.