Ancient history

Am I the only person who gets a Wix advert every time I try to watch a YouTube video? Or a Squarespace advert every time I listen to a podcast? I guess I've been identified as a potential buyer for these services! The ability to publish a website as quickly and easily as possible is big business.

These are the two main competitors to get you up and running fast and the results are actually pretty good. They look nice (if a bit generic) and are very easy to manage. And if you want anything a bit more powerful then there are plenty of Content Management Systems (CMS) to choose from too. But it wasn’t always this way.

The web started out as a mostly static affair. Plain old HTML was, and still is, the basis of a site. But back in the day, the ability to dynamically generate content wasn’t widely available to the average designer.

When my career got started in 1990s, every site I built was static. Granted, I didn’t know a whole lot at the time. Thus, so many of my projects became unwieldy nightmares when it came to maintenance. The task of, say, adding a new item to a navigation bar meant hacking my way through potentially hundreds of HTML files – depending on the size of the website. I even foolishly experimented with a Flash navigation for one website!

But recently I've returned to hand coding an HTML site for reasons took complicated to explain here. And this has got me thinking.

For years, I’ve dismissed static HTML as outdated and no longer useful in most situations. But maybe this dismissal may have been a bit unfair. Sure, those old school sites I worked on were a cause of major frustration when changes needed to be made. But does that mean static HTML no longer has a place on the web?

Part of the problem with using static HTML, for me at least, was the fact that it was forced into duties it should have never had in the first place. The intended use for HTML was as a markup language – not as a means to manage complex arrangements of files. But for websites built on a small budget, it was the best tool we had at the time.

Remember using nested tables to hack your way through a page layout? Through no fault of its own, HTML became a whipping boy for how not to do things.

I now realise that static HTML sites can still have a place on the web. This does depend on both the needs of your project and your skills as a developer. But, generally speaking, there might be some benefits:

1. Full-On CMS Functionality Isn’t Needed - Sites needing regular updates (like this blog) probably won't work outside of a CMS. But “brochure” style sites, for example, could be a perfect fit
2. Increased security - Static websites are almost completely safe compared with dynamic ones. This is because they don’t rely on CMS plugins or dynamic software
3. No software updates - As above, 70% of WordPress sites are at risk of getting hacked by malicious hackers because of lack of maintenance and upgrading. Scary!
4. Better reliability and speed - The absence of a middleman/database makes the static site much more speedy and easy to load 
5. Hosting and Price - Static websites have basic HTML files which require less space making the hosting of these websites cheaper than that of dynamic websites 

Just because this is an old fashioned way to build sites it doesn't mean it should be discounted. By looking back into history we may actually find a more suitable way of doing things!