My website is ugly because I made it
139 comments
·May 28, 2025donatj
oxalorg
Exactly this. My entire website is handcrafted, and not once but over the last decade almost ~10 times.
It's fun and I almost end up revamping something every year.
Everything handcrafted:
- the matrix js code on home page. https://oxal.org click on the matrix for a surprise!
- it's built using my own Static Site Generator: https://github.com/oxalorg/genox
- my website uses a css theme, again handcrafted: https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/
- if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor)
- it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet)
- i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.).
- the favicon is also pixel art, made when I was still in college! https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png
- I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used a Naruto inspired font
- and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page
I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so dearly!
navanchauhan
It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty.
Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
mgfist
You might like this guy's website - https://kdrag0n.dev/
(it's not me, I also don't know him personally)
chrisldgk
That’s hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a small mvp I made where I couldn’t be arsed to write any css myself. Good stuff
miloignis
I quite like the matrix w/ the surprise!
LoulouMonkey
I really like your website, it's both very clear / easy to navigate and yet unusual.
Great work!
runamuck
The floating robot makes me smile. Reminds me of 90s silliness. I love it!
p4bl0
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
This is exactly it!
My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
p4bl0
I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!
izietto
Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out there. Kudos
WhyIsItAlwaysHN
I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!
bradly
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.
Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead.
https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking site you'll see today.
90s_dev
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website.
Sure, that's a fine purpose.
But some websites just want to get a specific job done and be done with it.
AndrewStephens
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
bitwize
I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today.
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
natnatenathan
I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.
unsungNovelty
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project.
That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.
mcdonje
The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason.
I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.
BlackLotus89
If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town.
My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/
Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
ffsm8
Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link.
I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange.
And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links.
Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides?
But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
null
nemomarx
the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me so I have to assume it's a fashion choice
neogodless
And the original linked article actually links at the bottom
> Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap.
And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed.
Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this:
> taylor.town in 202x
handsclean
The fact that people can’t see beauty in a thing like this feels to me like people looking at a field of flowers and calling it ugly for all the ways it doesn’t look like Disney Land.
lynndotpy
Yeah, I thought this was one of those critiques of the enshittified web.
I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny to have:
(1) a banner about print editions (2) a cookie consent u (3) a header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern hallmarks of the bad internet, and (4) the first four words of the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup (5) Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a Member" button.
taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison
IshKebab
Yeah presumably because the ugly site has an awful background and poor font/colour choices that make it kind of hard to read. E.g.
https://taylor.town/wealth-000
I made my website myself too and it isn't ugly. This guy's website is ugly because he decided to make it ugly out of some misguided sense of self-importance.
GingerMidas
Self-important - sure, the author says as much themselves.
But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal site. Where would you guide them instead?
rchaud
There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid.
At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format.
Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.
ninininino
No need to be afraid, the point is the author isn't creating it to please an audience. They are creating it to please themself. So your opinion isn't relevant to the author or this linked written piece.
null
jjulius
I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.
rchaud
I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space.
It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
jjulius
Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters and neither does anything in your previous post. The author likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years. That's what they find important to them, not anything that you've mentioned. As the author writes...
>Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine.
>To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.
>That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine."
... and...
>Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.
>You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again.
They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant.
Hell yes, more power to them, I say.
davedx
I bet you’re lots of fun at parties
luckyandroid
Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention.
Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
piotrpdev
Haha, I suppose it's a bit risky to put spinning skeletons on your website these days since your potential future employer could see it. People are still making super cool and unique websites on Neocities[1] though.
AndrewStephens
I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way.
We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.
nonethewiser
His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist.
NOW its ugly.
Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
inanutshellus
His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable.
Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it.
The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him.
He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.
nonethewiser
This is the argument for post-modern art. Not necessarily beautiful, but evocative.
I guess one thing to note here is that MINE doesnt necessarily imply ugly.
inanutshellus
Yes, precisely. For myself, I don't find it ugly at all. I find it to be fun and retro. As mentioned elsewhere, it's very "Geocities".
jjulius
>But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product.
The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.
nonethewiser
>Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product.
That's the interesting part. I thought I agreed but it turns out I didnt. I realized this once my impression of his website's visuals went from positive to negative. I actually just found the simple/minimalist version beautiful in some way.
I mean it's great that he likes it - I have no problem with that. My conclusion was more that I would never be happy publishing something like that.
kapitanjakc
I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only
Maybe apache or nginx as webservers
host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier
I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.
neepi
AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price.
My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap. Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.
bradly
>AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price.
I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.
neepi
I would do that but I dislike Cloudflare because they wanted by DNS as well. I keep my DNS / CDN separate. Too many eggs in one basket otherwise.
qznc
Within minutes you could start at https://neocities.org/
donatj
I've never understood the whole centering a div meme.
width: 60%; // define your width as desired
margin: 0 auto;
nocman
I'm not sure if you are being serious about not understanding "the whole centering a div meme". Your example handles a trivial case, but does not address the whole of the problem.
As others have pointed out, vertical centering is often the problem being discussed (although difficulties with horizontal centering do happen). Anyone I know that has written any non-trivial web application has run into the situation where they spent way more time than they thought they should have to getting some element in a web application centered on the page the way they wanted it to be.
This article is a good example of the complexity, I think:
https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
The author makes a decision tree, which illustrates the complexity fairly well, and then there's a conversation in the comments between the author and a reader about whether parts of the decision tree are correct.
CSS is extremely complicated. It's easy to get lost in the complexity, and it can be very frustrating when you know how you want something to look, but can't quite figure out how to get it to happen.
That's why the meme is so popular. LOTS of people who deal with CSS can relate.
o_m
That's the old hacky way of doing it. place-content makes it even easier.
cuu508
Now center div with unknown height vertically :-)
And no cheating by using flexbox!
arp242
^ Comment flagged for sadomasochism.
skydhash
how do you center something on an axis with no limits placed to form a segments. That’s mathematically impossible unless you placed the limits first.
reconnecting
<center> </center>
It's been working for the second century.
alabastervlog
I'll still bust this out if it's some quick page that's not going to last long (like some kind of "service down for maintenance" page that's only going to be visible for a few minutes, or something)
It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go between writing HTML/CSS.
Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as many cycles as CSS centering methods.
dominiwe
I did the same: https://domi.work/
And it's also ugly :)
dguest
I love this:
- Most of it is CSS, which when removed still produces a pretty functional website.
- Most of the CSS is just one (commented out) background image
- There are about 5 lines of java script, which seem to just exist to obfuscate your email.
dominiwe
Wow, I completely forgot about that image! Thank you for reminding me (it is now gone).
It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in order to keep it all in one file. Actually that made me realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see changes live.
lo_zamoyski
GitHub has free hosting.
reconnecting
GitHub has poor browsers backward compatibility. Considering it's owned by Microsoft, we should probably start counting the days until it ends up behind a login wall like LinkedIn.
immibis
If your budget isn't literally zero, avoid AWS and get a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, or Hetzner Cloud, IMO.
The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which are about 50-100 times the market price.
edu
What I'm doing for my site is similar, I just sprinkle 11ty on top for the static generation, and then publish on netlify pages.
null
smjburton
Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.
jbd0
It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the page.
coldpie
Open up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1].
If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in.
[1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
nemomarx
that's on the blogging site - the actual Taylor.town doesn't have that.
I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
bru
Just this one article, as part of the magazine. Most are directly on his website.
aendruk
Yeah literally two thirds of this is adversarial. https://0x0.st/83AB.png I reflexively noped out.
whatnow37373
At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even if my sites doesn’t need it. It exudes this … je ne sais quoi.
severusdd
Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site is weird in its own way. I’ll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!
mehdix
> It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you.
Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.
jasir
The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e. click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose.
I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D
I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.
Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.
For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?