This was a refreshing reading. I appreciate appreciating the old style of websites. I am aware the author stated that they were not there to sell old websites to us, but I was sold. There’s something about retro websites that feels so much more human. There’s personality and charm in every website. Now, it’s all lost with the priority being readability and a simple interface being prioritized by websites nowadays. Commercial websites have taken over, and websites with quirks and personality are often seen as untrustworthy or sketchy.
If the commercial web is "industrial", you could say that the small web is "artisanal".
I especially liked this quote. There is something about coding that often feels cold to me. In most of my practices I make movements to visually result in something right away. With coding I type in lines of code and hope it looks like what I think it should look like, so initially there was this disconnect for me in artistry. As I kept practicing though it started to feel more artistic to me! And there is definitely something artisanal about the web work we do as a class compared to the websites churned out commercially.