The author seems to be resigned to the fact that HTML/CSS are skills that you should use as an introductory tool, and that just this is not enough to be "employable". I maintain that this is not true: many websites would do just fine with just those two (as in, they don't need JavaScript at all!), and I'm sure a very large fraction could get by with some small amount of hand-written frontend code hooked up to a database.
You would be incredibly hard-pressed to find a long-term job that only wants HTML and CSS skills without a huge additional career-level skill like visual design or various JavaScript frameworks.
It's doable if you're freelancing, but you'll almost always end up picking up additional skills in the process (or partnering with someone else) because your clients will ask for them.
Though I'd argue that freelancers themselves are a bit of a dying breed (at least in the US) because it's increasingly harder to afford things like healthcare when you're an individual with no company backing.
Every time I look a restaurant's web page and see delays downloading javascript crap when all I want to do is see a menu I think a person could make a good living just building basic HTML & CSS websites for small businesses. The site would likely be more responsive than some dynamically loaded javascript bloat just to show a few pictures and bit of text. It would also be maintainable by anyone, forever. No framework updates or APIs to learn.
It would be so simple you could even teach the business owner how to do basic updates, like changing the listed prices on the menu or changing the description of a dish. Sure, you don't get to charge them for these changes, but they'll be delighted they don't have to worry about paying a consultant's minimum fee just to update their menu.
This is exactly what I'm doing right now. Small businesses are being thrown HTML files and told to figure it out, it's crazy.
So I do the opposite and take care of everything. Design, build, deploy, maintain and update. I'm not a designer, but I take cues from their logos, menu, etc. I run it in the nearest AWS region for low latency, optimize all the assets, http2, etc. I strive to follow every best practice, within reason.
For a craft beer pub[0], I pull their current beers on tap from the Untappd![1] API, so the beers are always up to date. I also made a beautiful responsive menu that works great on mobile, tablet and desktop.
Where I'm really lacking is in self promotion. I do great work, but putting myself out there and selling myself is difficult. I will get there, though!
I'm doing this all to land a job doing front-end web dev somewhere I can grow my skills more. I came to programming late, but it is my passion.
Any thoughts on my site[2] would be much appreciated.
I think this is a great angle to take. Small businesses don't care at all about modern web development, and I think sites like this best suite their needs. Keep it up :)
Good on you for doing this. I too build what people need, not just stuff the industry says I should. You're doing good work if you're giving people what they need.
My latest project involved actually building a Wordpress site but in such a way that someone with no coding/html/css ability can alter it in a virtually unlimited variety of ways to build what he needs.
I actually built the site for the operator, not the business. And in turn that's already having positive impacts on the business as they can react and create things they need quickly.
Some parts I wrote myself but sure I hacked parts of it together with theme builders and plugins. Lambast me all you like but those were right for him as he had ownership/understanding of what they did for him rather than some unintelligible code. And that's what matters sometimes!
How do you get the business to agree to your design?
I would love to do something like this but when I used to try I always ran into the same problem.
The business owner would rather me follow the poor design choices of their competitors (hard to read text, bloated, random pop ups, etc). I always did it for them but it really killed me inside.
The problem is that small businesses either don't have the money to pay for a quality static site or don't want to. If you want to get into this industry as a dev you're competing against sweatshops that shit out these garbage websites in 2 days for $200 apiece. They're not optimising for easy-to-use tooling or a quality end product, they're optimising for stuff they can copy/paste as quick as possible. Back in the day when I was learning HTML/CSS, that meant a bunch of shit jQuery plugins. Today I imagine it's React components or something.
Not contradicting you directly -- but many small businesses also value the personal impressions and trust a lot more, and many of them have been burned by those sweatshops.
I think the tide is gradually turning and many small business owners would prefer to buy you a dinner and have a good chat with you and if they like you then they'll give you business, albeit small (though you can do 10 of these without much trouble if you optimize your own process).
There is a market niche for practical no-BS small website builders these days, IMO.
Which makes the author's pointless aversion to static websites strange. No, you often really don't need to have a database, relational or not, to just do a website.
I've seen so many sites dutifully set up with CMS backends and databases that only ever get updated by one person, and which only actually get updated once in a blue moon.
ETA: I mean, damn, how many people first got started just putting up or editing some static web pages, back in the 1990s and even 2000s?
My understanding was that the author isn't against static websites in general, but rather is against kludging together a functional equivalent to a CMS with backend scripts or third-party tools, when a RDB would be faster and simpler.
To expand on that, sqlite3 will most likely work best for 98% of all blogs out there. You hardly need a dedicated RDBMS service if 2-5 people put new articles few times a week.
> The author seems to be resigned to the fact that HTML/CSS are skills that you should use as an introductory tool
…And she's right. It's the perfect introductory tool in web development, because that's what any given framework is going to be abstracting over anyway. A student needs to feel the pain of typing everything a million times before the solution of a templating system really makes sense. Same goes for event delegation, browser inconsistencies, etc.
> and that just this is not enough to be "employable". I maintain that this is not true: many websites would do just fine with just those two (as in, they don't need JavaScript at all!), and I'm sure a very large fraction could get by with some small amount of hand-written frontend code hooked up to a database.
You're right that many websites would do just fine with static sites — most of the (highly paid!) advertising industry is brochure sites. But that's not the market though. You do need more than just HTML and CSS to be competitive in the market, even if you're BSing your way through most of it.
Most websites could work without JS but they would be in a degraded form. You need JS when you want a select to change the fields displayed on the form. You need JS when you want to make the list resortable by drag and drop. You need JS when you want a page with a list to not reload every time you press delete on an item.
Sure you could make it work with JS but you would be degrading the user experience for no reason at all.
The developer must understand when it's time to use a framework. A small website with few pages doesn't need a frontend framework. But if you have to deal with a large/complex application using a web framework is not a bad idea as they offer a lot of reusable components, you don't need to "reinvent wheels" using HTML & CSS.
> The developer must understand when it's time to use a framework
Frameworks are useful but not nearly as much as people might think. There are many cases where a static site generator (as a simple example, Markdown → HTML converters) or simple templating solution may be "enough", and they're relatively easy to understand as bells and whistles on top of HTML and CSS.
There's no moral panic about project managers though. Their decisions do not affect the excesses of software development in any way, only those of software developers do. ;-)
