A friend asked me if I could build him a simple website for his new Mechanical Engineering business: just a few pages showing off what they’re about and what they can do.

This is the sort of work I did when I was just starting out with web dev - marketing sites. It’s been 14 years since I worked a gig like this, and I was so struck by how much easier everything is now.

First of all, the capabilities of CSS are absolutely magical. I needed to do a course to catch up on my knowledge and feel confident again but once I did… putting together layouts is a dream.

At one point my friend asked if I could change all the places where they had yellow to blue… back in the day this would have been annoying but all I had to do was update a single custom property! I made multiple Netlify Deploy previews for him to look at with different shades of blue and it all took me under 10 minutes.

And because of improvements to CSS and the native platform you need so much less JavaScript to achieve specific layouts and functionality. When you do need JS, you can just use the regular JavaScript API, no need for third party libraries like jQuery or MooTools (lol).

Look, I am old and I am comparing this to the Dark Ages when we were still on CSS 2, but I just can’t move past how much better and easier everything is!

At the same time I’m cognisant of the fact this isn’t really a job anymore. My friend had no interest in messing with a Squarespace and was willing to pay my hourly rate to build a static site because he knew he could trust me to do a good job. Most clients probably feel differently, and would prefer to either choose these low or no-code tools to make the websites themselves, or employ devs to build bloated React projects. My own day job is building an incredibly complex Web Application.

What a shame that is, as the technology has never been better for developers to build lean, accessible and attractive websites.