"How do you build your web pages?"

Simple, static, hand-crafted HTML, plus Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). To change the appearance I need only update my CSS file. Perhaps I should add, however, that — like its elderly proprietor — 'molehole' is optimised for use with desktop PCs and comfortably large display screens. (I ignore "viewport".)

Is there a philosophy behind 'molehole'?

Yes (surprisingly). Although it's a personal hobbyist site, as I say on the Home page...

I keep things hereabouts as simple¹ as I know how — but no simpler.

"Simple", in my opinion, equates to:

• having a standard look'n'feel across pages,
• using simple navigation across the site,
• providing a consistent access path into each area of the site,
• offering breadcrumb trails, lightweight graphics and Javascript, a clean textual layout.

Nothing fancy. Almost no animation, no interactivity. Just web pages that load cleanly into any modern web browser. Things are improving as more and more sites converge on relatively few canned themes and paradigms for info org but — frankly — I stick with my "RISC" / Zen approach where I know what every line of HTML does and why it's there.

I field occasional requests...

... from people wishing to link to 'molehole', and rather more often from people suggesting (or insisting) 'molehole' should link to them. I even sometimes get asked to stop linking to them. A polite email works wonders.

I reserve the right to move things around. Link here if you wish, but I suggest you link only to my Home Page. (I make 'molehole' navigation simple and straightforward from there. And I offer a Site Map. I even update it occasionally.) Obviously, I have no control over who chooses to link to what. That's entirely up to you...

   

My thanks to:

• Jonathan Corum (13pt) for the CSS that inspired Molehole's design. It still evolves, of course. (Slowly.)
• Chris Heilmann's neat list magic that I adapted for my top navigation bar.

Footnote

¹  I was just as guilty as everyone else of over-complex web page design in earlier times. For example, having been instructed by "da management" to make my IBM Java web site pages "sexier", I foolishly allowed a student adept with Photoshop to construct for me a complex animated front page image map, and tie it up in knots with associated auto-generated Dreamweaver code I hadn't a hope in hell of modifying, for an early incarnation of IBM's internal Java Information Hub site. It may have looked gorgeous — opinions varied! — but it certainly crashed early web browsers almost as often as the ill-advised Java ticker-tape applet I'd equally unwisely used on what was then the main IBM external Java web site (also briefly my responsibility at the time). Such good fun.