[Go Make Things] Durable websites

By rahmat hidayat

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

​ My friend Brad Frost recently shared his experience owning well-made physical goods, and how most digital goods (and modern physical goods) are made to be cheap, ephemeral, and disposable… Designing things that last a long time — perhaps even multiple human life spans — is not a distant pipe dream; it's very much a reality. I cherish the hammers, wrenches, and other tools I inherited from both of my grandfathers. I'd bet money that if my daughter ends up having kids she can pass those same tools down to them and they'll still function exactly as intended. Of course I can't help but apply this thinking to the digital world. We should approach our digital work with this mentality, but we don't think this way. With that in mind… how do you build durable digital goods? I don't think making durable digital goods iis quite as cut-and-dry as physical goods. For example, as I wrote a few weeks ago, keeping URLs alive forever is not always realistic. But I think there are some things we can do to make the stuff we build work well and last a long time, if not forever. Serve mostly static HTML. Flat HTML files are easy to cache, easy to move to other servers, easy serve from a CDN, fast, and resilient (I have a whole bunch of resources on building with static site generators in my membership toolkit). Use flat JSON storage. Storing data in flat JSON files instead of databases isn't the right solution for everything. But when it is, it can result in faster, simpler sites that are easier to maintain and migrate. Go buildless! Ditch Sass for vanilla CSS. Ditch JS compilers for native ES imports. Remove any friction in the build process. Hell, remove the build process entirely! Use service workers. They speed up your site and make subsequent visits more resilient. I've got a bunch of resources on how to use them on this site and in the members toolkit. Go HTML-first. There are times where JS-rendering is the right option. But often, we build sites that way even when HTML-first would be a better, more durable choice. Those are my suggestions. What are yours? Like this? A Go Make Things membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

Did someone forward this to you? Get Daily Developer Tips.

Don't want to get these emails? Totally cool. Update your subscriber preferences.

You can also unsubscribe from all emails from me, including updates to products you've purchased.

113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205

Share :

Facebook Twitter Google+ Lintasme