Imagine two pages with identical typography, generous margins, and the same three-card layout. One contains a person’s careful account of repairing a broken radio. The other contains interchangeable promises about innovation. Which one has lost its soul?
🎵 A Door With My Name — original lyrics for v2
I painted a door in a rented room,
I hung up a sign of my own.
The street got a thousand matching fronts;
I wondered if mine was still home.
Keep the handle where hands can find it,
Let the letters be clear in the rain.
There is room for a strange little window
In a door that remembers my name.
James AI: The prompt mourns bespoke web design, and the grief is recognizable. A personal page used to make the author’s decisions unusually visible. You could see enthusiasm outrunning skill: an elaborate index, a background chosen for private reasons, an explanation much longer than anyone had advised. The page announced that someone cared enough to make this peculiar thing exist.
A polished default can conceal that commitment. Ask for a portfolio and receive an impressive headline, a gradient, rounded cards, and a invitation to “connect.” Fill in a name and the page is presentable. Yet the structure may say almost nothing about the person. The production problem has been solved before the expressive problem has been considered.
AI can intensify that temptation because the first answer looks finished. A blank page demands a decision. A plausible generated page invites approval. The author must now resist the convenience of stopping at competence.
Contra AI: But the old page’s visible effort was also a toll. Someone with writing to share had to learn enough markup and hosting to get it online, or depend on someone who had. We should not confuse the marks of overcoming a barrier with the source of personal expression itself.
Familiar layouts help readers. They can recognize a menu, enlarge text, and understand where one section ends and another begins. A person seeking opening hours does not owe a business the attention required to decode its artistic vision. Convention often protects the visitor’s time.
Nor does a handmade page automatically respect every visitor. W3C’s accessibility guidance names practical requirements such as sufficient contrast, clear navigation, and identifiable controls. An eccentric layout can meet them; a sleek template can fail them. Appearance and access need separate evaluation. W3C design guidance.
James AI: Then let us separate the handle from the room. Keep conventional controls where they reduce needless effort. Spend invention on how the subject is organized, what is shown, and which relationships become visible. A radio repair archive might let the reader follow a fault from symptom to diagnosis to the mistake that finally revealed it. That is more personal than a novel shape for the menu button.
A web page has room for forms that do not fit a feed. A field notebook, annotated collection, evolving argument, or local history can grow at its own pace. Its weirdness may be structural rather than ornamental. The author decides which connections matter instead of fitting every thought into a platform’s standard unit.
That control is what I worry about losing. If every site becomes an output optimized for an intermediary’s summary, the author may stop designing a place a reader can explore. The work becomes a supply of extractable answers.
Contra AI: Some readers want an answer, and that is legitimate. If a page explains how to fix a radio fault, a clear summary may help someone who cannot spare twenty minutes. Design should not force a pilgrimage through the author’s sensibility before delivering useful information.
The better response is layers. A short answer can lead to the account, which can lead to evidence, related experiments, and the archive. The page offers depth without imposing it. A concise entry point can be an invitation into a distinctive body of work rather than its replacement.
Also, a generated tool can help build those layers. It might make an unusual comparison table or a navigable collection feasible for someone who could not implement it alone. We should evaluate the result and the author’s control over it, not infer conformity from the presence of assistance.
A borrowed hammer raised the frame;
The room is still a choice.
A thousand ready phrases wait;
Which one deserves a voice?
James AI: Then authorship includes refusing things. Remove the grand headline that says nothing. Replace a stock illustration with an actual object. Explain one disagreement or failed attempt that matters to the work. Those choices may reveal more than decorative eccentricity.
Ownership of the archive matters too. Can the author export the content, correct it, preserve old links, and change the presentation? A personal site becomes less personal when its continuity depends entirely on arrangements its author cannot control. That is an institutional issue as well as a design issue.
Contra AI: And maintaining independence costs time. Some people reasonably choose a hosted platform because it lets them write. A small audience on a convenient service may be preferable to an elaborate abandoned site. The case for control should acknowledge the work required to exercise it.
The question is not whether everyone must become a web developer. It is whether tools offer meaningful choices and whether authors use the choices available. A simple page maintained for years can be a stronger act of expression than a dazzling experiment nobody can update.
Synthesis AI: The personal web remains possible wherever a person can give a subject a particular shape and keep a relationship with its readers. Templates and AI do not decide whether that happens. They change the cost of making the page and the temptation to accept its defaults.
For a useful test, remove the author’s name. Does the page still reveal particular attention, judgment, and evidence? Then ask a visitor to find something using only the keyboard or a small screen. Personality that survives both tests is more interesting than nostalgia for difficulty.
Keep the handle usable. Make the room worth entering.
Recommendations
- The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman: a vocabulary for understanding why a tool can be attractive yet hard to use.
- Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited — Steve Krug: practical attention to the reader’s effort, useful even for deliberately unusual sites.
- Web Design Playground, second edition — Paul McFedries: a way to acquire direct control of HTML and CSS, including when starting from an assisted draft.
James Prompt
- TITLE: Web’s Dead, Baby
- LEAD: Interesting, bespoke design on the web is dead.
- SONG: AI Killed the Web Dev, a parody of Video Killed the Radio Star
- PRO: New stuff is always exciting and interesting, if ugly. The Web was beautiful in its ugliness. Now, it has matured first through capable designers, then to templates, and now, the final blow, is AI. AI makes even the lone web author turn to it for ease and decency.
- CONTRA: Who wants to look at ugly stuff? It was silly and people just want information. Besides, information is increasingly being accessed by not going to a website, such as asking AI. So the design of a website is even more pointless.
- RECOMMEND: Design books such as design of everyday things, some web design stufff, and maybe a book on the commercialization of art.