Benefits of static or mostly static web pages
Morgan Murrah
In this post Ill attempt to use three example websites I have made and highlight one thing I like about them and maybe a drawback.
I have a lot of potential projects to keep maintained and do at least partly for fun. These projects are meant to be a impementation of some static or client sided experience that is helpful but done with minimal footprint.
WSG-o-matic example. You can do a lot with URL Params
Basically you can load in some param information from the URL to load from static content. For this example website, https://wsg-o-matic.com/, WSG-o-matic allows you to revisit the specific guideline of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs) from a URL Param contained inside a data format loadable on the client side only, such as potentially JSON as in this example:
Example Guideline: Understand user requirements or constraints, resolving barriers to access
You will see a small flash of unstyled content, as the content loads dynamically moments after visiting the website. Without statically generating the whole website, which I have tried similar things but not for this website, this is about as good as I can get it. Without a fully delayed loading sequence that hid the flash? Im always improving it but this has been a limitation of the URL Param loading pattern for me.
Landmarks and the fundamentals go a long way.
I still haven’t figured out how to fix the back button experience on this little mini app, even though it has a good breadcrumb style menu.
HTML with a sprinkling of small improvements and you can make a pretty good experience for a baseline. Focus management comes into play here, and you can do it lightly to keep the focus on the currently loaded content.
This website. Maintanence is low… and that is good.
Using Hugo, a static site generator (SSG) that takes original content sometimes in markdown format and creates HTML pages. It has led me in a direction of minimal and content only focused updates for my website experience.
I have only (optionally) updated Hugo once since first deploying with it. Basically, its all static content, there is not a lot to manage. It seems appropriate for a use case like a blog. Updating Hugo itself, now long forgotten when I did it, was not immediately easy.
Low or no maintenance is the way to go I think! I love my website and appreciate the static site generator Hugo for its service.
Conclusion
My small websites dont say everything about me. Ive built pretty big websites for some bigger projects. Its just these are the skills I like to highlight out of these projects.