This is an updated & abridged version of the talk I gave at several conferences throughout 2022/23, including Beyond Tellerrand, CSS Day and FFConf.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it’s your space and you can do whatever you want with it.

In the early days of the web, there were a lot of sites like this. People would build websites for their families, fansites for bands they liked, or just homepages they filled with random junk. It was a fun thing to do, and a great way to connect with people. They really don’t make ’em like they used to.

It feels like we’ve lost this decades-old art form; the individuality of design and the uniqueness of content you used to see on these webpages. The notion of experimenting with HTML and CSS without worrying about something looking weird or out of place. The beauty of a website built by a person, because they wanted to.

But websites are for business… right?

Many of you reading this will probably get paid to build websites. I do, to an extent. And a lot of these websites will probably be very similar: marketing, e-commerce, ultimately something designed to make money either by selling something or advertising something. Maybe you’ve had to stick some tracking pixels in, do some a/b testing to see what variant converts better, and do some forbidden invocations to get Google Tag Manager working. The kind of web development that makes you question your life choices.

And these sites all look identical. The same style of icons, black CTAs, the same pops of the same colours. I keep landing on websites and thinking I’m looking at Vercel, and it’s become this kind of bland VC-funded corporate identity that all startups have nowadays. And a lot of the content is similar too, because it ultimately comes down to what works for SEO. I gave this talk before Generative AI was quite so ubiquitous, and it’s even worse now with so many websites full of absolute garbage content spewed out of ChatGPT, and nobody knows how Google ranks pages any more.

These sites are providing a service, and are transactional in nature. There’s always going to be a place on the internet for them – even if I wish they’d put a bit more effort into making their sites a bit more interesting-looking. I guess I’m asking: where did the fun web go?

I learned HTML back in 2000, and things were pretty different then*. I can’t imagine how intimidating it must be to be a newcomer now with all of these frameworks and expectations. If you do get into web dev now you’re probably doing it to make a career of it; you might do a bootcamp, or a course, some kind of formalised training. And if you are studying with a view to doing it professionally, you’re much more likely to target what people are hiring for – whichever framework is so hot right now – skipping right over the basics.

I’ve interviewed quite a few folks for web development jobs over the years, where it’s clear they’ve only ever done React – and the requisite amount of JavaScript required to do React – and never got a good foundation in HTML or CSS that you need to build good quality, accessible, performant websites.

* but 99% of that HTML would still work perfectly on the web today, thanks to glorious backwards compatibility! Isn’t that cool? (Provided it wasn’t mostly tags, of course…)

But I still have fun on the web!

Well, sure. But ultimately the websites we use for fun are also for business. Think about how you use the web today: chances are, many of you spend the majority of your time on a handful of websites and apps owned by big companies like Meta and Condé Nast.

Under the guise of a free service, these companies are making money from data they’re harvesting from us. “We are the product” may be a tired cliché at this point, but it’s a cliché for a reason. They might not be explicitly selling it on, but they are 100% using your data to feed into advertising algorithms. We upload images, videos, run our social lives and even our businesses on these platforms. Instagram’s terms of service give Meta carte blanche to reproduce, distribute or copy your images royalty-free.

Meta makes an absolute killing on advertising that can reach highly specific target markets, and they wouldn’t be able to do that without using your personal data and browsing habits to label your user account with things they think you like.

Have you looked at your Instagram/Facebook settings lately, in the ad preferences section? It’s quite illuminating what they decide to use to target you.

Laura Kalbag gave a great talk about digital privacy at FFConf 2019, and it was this talk that spurr