Twelve websites: one year later

A year has gone by since I started this project, and I’ve built a total of nine websites. I started on a whim, feeling the need to set up some kind of system for myself so I didn’t become distracted or languish with something that wasn’t worth my time.

I found the process to be extremely helpful to me in better understanding and defining my practice of design and engineering websites. I set off to learn something about simplicity:

I want to see what happens when I am bounded by a timeframe; just one month to turn something that could be a website into a website. I have a very constrained amount of time to dedicate to this project, probably somewhere around 2-6 hours a week. That will require that what I make is simple in concept, design, and implementation.

To be honest I have no idea what simple really means in this context. The point of this project is to figure that out. What is simplicity in design, implementation, and process?

Simplicity is not simple. A simple idea for a website can be incredibly complicated to build. There’s a difference between a simple and understandable concept and how that concept is executed. As a result, the goal often became how to simplify the implementation. Over the course of this project I developed a kind of reference of different prototypical problems and solutions. While I started by building websites using a modern javascript framework, I gradually shifted to adopting a kind of “progressive enhancement” model where the underlying page is built with plain html, and any interactivity is injected with a little bit of vanilla javascript. This prototype limited the sorts of things I could build, bounds which were necessary to ensuring both design and implementation stayed as simple as possible. Another prototype was how I approached architecting the backend portion of the systems I built: I started with a traditional database and REST API, and gradually shifted to either relying only on a local filesystem and building a static site, or writing a very simple serverless function, or a combination of the two.

Twelve Websites also became a kind of playground for ideas I wanted to quickly try out. I am a subscriber to the idea that 90% of the things you create are shit, so this was a way of trudging through the shit without becoming too bogged down. Of course it isn’t really that simple: often the sites I made had maybe one interesting idea obscured inside a large glob of bad or mediocre ideas. The final product wasn’t that important; this was a way to mine for ideas worth pursuing. I’ve definitely found those ideas—this coming year’s project has been distilled from my learnings from everything I’ve built for Twelve Websites. I’m going to switch modes away from rapid exploration of a large set of ideas into rapid iteration around a core idea. It’s time to start building the thing I’ve been dancing around for a year.

Twelve websites: complete.