In this post, I’ll elaborate on the thinking behind the recent website revamp, and stating more explicitly the theory and principles which influenced my decisions in how the website should function and why. As such, it is a post less on the technical side of things, and more on the philosophy.

A Manifesto?

Yes, I initially found the wording of such a post a little peculiar, however, after seeing many use the term, I decided to adopt it for this post too: a statement of intent.

Here are similar documents some I’ve come across:

Site design standards, the internet, Manifesto, Internet manifesto, Manifesto, My Manifesto, and We Are Not At A Crossroads.

I also think this critique of such manifestos is also worth reading: my thoughts on neocities manifestos.

Content

In this section, I’ll be focused on the content of my website and what I hope it achieves and represents, because the content is at the heart of any website. It does not matter how a website looks or behaves if there is poor quality content once the user accesses it.

Learning In Public

When I was looking into digital gardens, one narrative stood out: Learning In Public. That being that we should be sharing our progress on whatever it is we do, because it helps us and helps others. For me personally, I’ve been trying to do this as a means to battle my perfectionism, make mistakes and change course in public, and realise nothing bad happens as a result.

As such, this is the main ethos I would like my content to represent, how I write about things changing, my thinking about these changes, and possibilities next. My posts are partly logs, and partly an article.

User Experience

I’ll go into this a bit more in the Accessibility section, but as something which affects all my visitors, I want to have a user experience which can be considered as pleasant. I don’t want them to have to worry about slow pages or if their data will be eaten up. I don’t want the content to be degraded by obnoxious pop-ups, annoying adverts, or the content just being nonsensical through SEO bloat.

The first part is more technical, but I do think it is also philosophical as it is something I am seeing people - good and nice people on the Web Revival boat, choosing to create websites which are slow and eat up data with little to no consideration of the user. These are often off-set with declarations that “this is my website for me to express myself” and that “my website was made for me and not you”.

I understand such sentiments, but do worry not only about the accessibility aspect I will discuss in the next section, but about a mentality that an exclusionary web is fine, and it’s okay to exclude some people as long as the web administrator is happy. It’s not a stance I am personally content with, and would feel saddened if a user had such a poor experience on my website that they were unable to access my content.

The next point goes to essentially capitalism. SEO bloat creating poor content to make you click on a page which will then load up a bunch of adverts and a pop-up begging you to sign up to the newsletter so you will be notified when new content is out so you can back to the website to see more adverts. Me saying this is nothing groundbreaking or interesting, but I wanted to clearly state my distain for such websites, and how these websites are ruining the user experience browsing the internet. No one likes these websites, and yet we have to put up with them. Because money.

Even if you do install an ad-block, and I also highly recommend setting up a custom DNS if you are able (mine is an absolute life changer), that does little to the pollution of websites creating poor quality content to trick search engines to displaying their websites higher up the results. It often feels like the best place to actually find answers, advice and information these days is sadly on Reddit, which brings me to…

Closed Silos

My content is here on this website. I also have a Mastodon account where I talk more casually, and a Status Cafe where I post quick updates on my life.

My content is not behind a barrier, such as a Facebook page which requires you to login to see more information, nor hidden away somewhere like Discord where you again have to join the server to access the data. Reddit has great content, but the recent changes to API access and the removal of moderators from their own communities by staff, have shown how this content was never ours to begin with. The keys to the data are being held by someone else, and they can restrict and cut off access as they please.

I am personally annoyed at how my favourite applications will eventually stop working with Reddit due to API changes, but I am more annoyed at how the website with the most “real” content on the internet is at risk of disappearing.

This website may one day vanish. I host it via UberSpace, and if they do not get paid, the website gets deleted, though I could looks into archival methods so the website will live on via somewhere like the WayBack Machine. However, I write almost all of the website in Markdown, and I have been able to re-write this website a few times now, but all the content has been able to move pretty easily between the versions as those .md files rarely need changing. I can pretty much take these small files anywhere with me and republish elsewhere with little difficulty. Thus, I do not see my content as being stuck in one place, which is important to me.

Furthermore, I have an RSS feed which automatically updates whenever the website does, which means my content can be viewed outside of my website and via an RSS reader of your choice instead, truly existing outside of any silo.

Lastly, I also want to break silos even more by embodying a movement where it is encouraged to keep interlinking across the internet and not have your website be a dead end. I want my posts to have many links for your to read or follow up from, and I also want you to know about websites I like and people I’ve found interesting.

Expression

Finally in this section, I’ll be boring and state that my content is an expression of who I am. I intend to write to be informative, hoping someone somewhere stumbles across something I’ve linked to or said, and find that help them in their life. However, that content has to first be relevant to me, and I won’t be writing about stuff I don’t care about.

Accessibility

I take accessibility seriously. I never used to, but after spending time with people who experience the web differently, I realised how important it was to make my website become more inclusive. As best put here, “an inaccessible web is not a free web”, and while fighting the good fight against Web 3.0 and corporations is neat and all with our handmade unique websites, how effective are they if we leave people behind due to our design decisions?

Colours

Although I knew I wanted to lean into the Rosé Pine palette, I had to make sure the combinations I used, and in what ways, met at least Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA Normal, and I used Colour Contrast Checker to help check these. I also did this with the other themes I later added. If I do have a combination below these standards, please let me know via Mastodon.

Having an appropriate colour contrast is important as if the contrast is poor, it may be excluding people with some visual impairments. WhoCanUse has examples of how certain colour combinations may appear to people with certain impairments. Plus, accessible colour contrast can be fun, RandomA11y has many bright and colourful ideas.

Access

I wanted the website to be accessible, literally able to access, on mobile devices, screens with various display sizes, and functional via using zoom. Sadly, I’ve seen Web Revival websites which break when zoomed in or on mobile devices, or even in smaller desktop window sizes. This is a problem not just for accessibility, where some may need to make text larger to view more comfortably, but this also affects those on older hardware with smaller screen sizes and many people who simply do not have a desktop or laptop, and can only access the internet via a mobile device.

I also did not want force people into using certain web browsers only to access this website. As such, it has been tested on Manjaro Linux and Mac OS, and on Firefox, Librewolf, Brave, Vivaldi, Chrome, and Safari. I have yet to test on a Windows machine or on Edge due to a lack of current access, though will test as soon as that changes.

Images

I have tried to make sure all images have alt text to visually describe them, and to blur any animated graphics until hovered over so as to not trigger people with visual sensitivities. Emojis have been favoured as emojis have inherent “alt text” via their unicode origins, whereas the implementation of icons, like those from Font Awesome, require further work to be accessible.

Consistency

I have tried to create consistency for the user so all links are the same colour, except the links in the Table of Contents which mirror the headers instead to help the user know which of those links are linked to what type of header. I tried to make sure all links are bolded, except those within long texts as this may make the reading experience more difficult, though all links of any kind are underlined, and the underline is not used anywhere else.

I have tried to standardise font sizes, though I may have made a few errors along the way, I am trying to fix these whenever I encounter them. I’ve also made sure the layout doesn’t change and stays consistent between pages.

Text

Alongside compliant colour contrasts and a font I think helps with readability, I have also tried to make sure I’ve written using either CamelCase or pascalCase to assist screen readers, and tried to make links more descriptive by explaining them, though I may have made mistakes and missed chances to correct them, but will rectify these if found.

Conclusion

I’m not saying my website perfectly follows my own manifesto. I’m sure it doesn’t, I’m sure there are mistakes I have made, but my intent is to try to be better and try to create a website as best as I can to adhere to the principles in this manifesto.

I do think with some reflection, others might be able to do something similar. I’m hoping this manifesto won’t just be a case of naval-gazing, or simply a document to hold myself accountable, I hope others may read it and see what steps they can take to think about the user visiting their website.

I know that a lot of Web 1.0 had loud graphics with clashing colours and was an assault on the eye at times - surely a tribute to that era, an era that wasn’t inclusive, has to remain this way to be fitting of the time? Well, I would argue that both can be done with some compromises, and the spirit can remain.

Graphics can be compressed to reduce size and given alt text for screen readers, colours checked for decent contrasts, and animations paused or blurred until the user acts to activate them. Layouts can be built to be responsive to screen sizes, even those with multiple DIVs: Sadgrl’s layout builder has the option for two sidebars alongside a main DIV, and they collapse down accordingly to all fit neatly inside smaller screens.

I’m not one to seek out controversy, I want us all to be happy and have fun, but I think this sort of thing is important. Just a few small steps may greatly improve access to our websites and welcome our users to them rather than appear as hostile experiences which feel exclusionary and discriminatory against those with certain disabilities, impairments and sensitivities.