Kiss

KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) is my favourite design principle. I use it for everything I build and even in everyday life. The principle says it all, keep it as simple as you can. In practice I’ve done this with a few projects recently. The landing page for my new site slowwwtech.com is as simple as a single html file with a font and some basic css. And, my new commonplace site commonplace.daniebker.co.uk is just a hugo site with a very basic custom theme¹ and a few custom css rules. The commonplace site has grown as I needed to link between pages or add backlinks. Frameworks are only added as needed and I try to keep the stack as minimal as possible. My commonplace site actually started out as a single markdown using pandoc to convert it to html. Only when linking between pages became necessary did I add hugo to the mix.

I’ve seen videos on YouTube about building a ‘linktree’ page and using frameworks like Next.js, tailwind, and whatever else is the flavour of the month. What this does is overly complicate what is essentially a single page with a few links. You don’t need a framework to build a page that simple. You don’t need tailwindcss to compress the 10 or so lines of css you need to make it look nice. Perhaps people are trying to learn new frameworks or tools, but I think it’s a mistake to use them when things can be so simple. I think this is a symptom of the modern web. We have so many tools and frameworks that we reach for them without thinking. If we took more of a step back and broken problems down into their basic form we can build things that are simpler, faster, and easier to maintain.