Ask HN: Is there demand for static websites with clean, semantic HTML/CSS/JS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there demand for static websites with clean, semantic HTML/CSS/JS?

20 pointsTDvz10 comments

Hi, I'm a web developer with several years of experience developing websites using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I´ve also developed several full stack applications with relatively complex backends (mainly Ruby/Ruby on Rails).

I'm currently on a teaching non-tenure track (teaching web technologies), which I love, but the pay in my country is very low.

I'm confident I have the creativity and formal knowledge to develop high quality static websites. So I'm looking for opportunities.

That said, I return to my initial question: is there still demand for semantic, performant, custom static websites?

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I've worked as a web developer for ten years on websites with millions of monthly views (e.g NFL, HowStuffWorks, etc.) while living in Los Angeles. I've also hired and managed a remote team of developers while living in Asia.

I'm working on a website for my girlfriend's Chinese teaching business. We paid a premium for branding, logo design, and photography. Even though I've worked in the publishing industry for years, making marketing pages full time for much of that time, the website I'm creating is with a Leadpages template with the company's brand colors.

If you want to brand yourself as an excellent frontend developer, here's what I'd suggest:

1. Skip trying to go the agency route to find clients. Clients want a full-service agency (design + development + managing ad spend) or agencies specializing in specific social platforms. Development is always an afterthought or a cost center in these examples.

2. Find an established company or startup and reach out to their MARKETING team, not their engineering team. Marketing teams are the ones looking for static websites the most. I have a close friend who's a MASTER at CSS. Best CSS person I've met in my life. He's made an excellent career, getting San Francisco salary while working remotely in the middle of nowhere in Canada. He couldn't write a unit test or do a leetcode problem to save his life, but the marketing team loves him more than anyone else.

3. Be EXCELLENT at front end. Invest in some high-quality online courses for CSS. Be able to center divs in your sleep. This strategy will only work if you're excellent, especially if you're trying to get USA level pay remotely. If you're only average, or even great, you're competing with thousands who are equally as good as you.

The good news is being EXCELLENT is incredibly doable. Lots of engineers (including myself) switch from a frontend focus to full stack/backend because they're not fans of design, so their CSS skills deteriorate.

I don't think there exists a single person who both a) cares about "clean, semantic HTML/CSS/JS" and b) can't build such website himself.

Now if you forget the letter soup and instead go for "clean, stylish design and magnificent UI" you'll find as much work as you had back then.

If I ever decided to go that route again (tried, failed) I would create several micro web agencies each targeting a niche. An agency specialised in websites for accountants, another one specialising in websites for architects, etc. Businesses spend a surprising amount of money when buying "premium". Follow that money.

Depending on the market, absolutely. Especially if you are not averse to templating-style work.

But given the experience you shared, I don't really know if you mean that you are providing end-to-end experiences, e.g. bundling a static site generator and instructions as to how to blog with it, or if you are instead just packaging flat files with .html to be opened in the browser OR maybe used for someone else's templating work, and that's it.

If it's more just "I wanna author HTML" then the opportunities may be more limited and you may have to answer more directly to the graphic design & SEO parts of the customer base in order to build up clientele. (My experience with people who use the word "semantic" in their list of skills has been that graphic design & SEO aren't really as interesting for them :-))

Related question maybe--can you see yourself building on others' graphics-focused work to make that kind of thing more semantically acceptable? That could be an interesting position.

Either way good luck to you.

Thank you for your feedback.

I'm interested and know how to implement everything on the front-end - structure and content (HTML), presentation and positioning (CSS), and interactivity (JavaScript).

The content would have to be provided by the client, but I can perfectly deal with the rest (if the client hasn't a designer, for instance).

If the client provides designs and interaction guidelines, no problem at all, I know (or will learn) how to implement them - using semantically appropriate HTML code, custom CSS and JavaScript (JS).

I really love a handcrafted package of HTML, CSS, and JS. That's what I would like to do, if there's demand - thence my question :).

That sounds viable to me. Basically a small web development agency. There are lots of basic websites out there. People want them to be easily indexed, easy to update. Thus the whole JAM stack thing and Wordpress dominance.

One thing you might look at - promotional sub sites for e-commerce. There are e-retailers that have a main store implemented as a web app. Then the business people get some bright idea for a new promotion or product line or something. They need to whip up a mini site just for the project. It will live for maybe a couple months. They don’t want to take their core devs with it, so maybe you can step in.

Is there a big market? Yes.

But the problem is that the combination of site builders out there (Wix, Squarespace) and thousands of free templates means that many businesses can get about 80% of the benefit of a great custom site for a fraction of the cost.

My suggestion? Treat building sites as a side gig and see how it goes.

I wonder if the market for that is closer to public sector work, or anything else with a hard requirement of accessibility. "Clean, semantic HTML" is very compatible with "parsable with accessibility tools", and so far difficult for automated publishing tools to get right without human intervention.

Also, if there was any money left in interactive editorial work — creating bespoke storytelling visualizations for news or long-form stories — I might look there, because the requirements often require thinking outside of what dynamic or automated publishing tools provide. But that feels like an already small and shrinking field.

If you can build a simple to use CMS to go along with whatever you make then sure.

And make it so it can be hosted on something sensible where as a client all I need to do is drop some images and a json text map using ftp and the site will start using those assets.

Being able to make excellent static sites and more advanced things than that is the easy part. Convincing the potential customer to give you the time of the day is the hard part. They will go with their nephew, Wix, an expensive local agency using Wordpress, or social media only - anybody but a competent web designer. Yes I said web designer.

Use your creativity and skills to create killer online businesses for yourself instead of trying to sell web sites to others. It will save you a lot of frustration.

This is my experience.

Short answer is of course yes. There are plenty of small businesses that need a web site to advertise their presence, etc, but without dynamic content requiring a database.

Of course finding clients will take a bit of leg-work, and given they don't have a site already, it would suggest they wouldn't be willing to spend a lot of money.

You'd be competing with things like Wix, Squarespace and so on though. There are lots of ways to quickly and cheaply make simple info sites.

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