Have you ever wanted to make a super fast website, that can download and execute faster than a neuron in your brain can fire? Have you ever wanted to brag to your friends about how your website, on a fresh load, only downloads 12KB of data?

You're in luck. Here are my top 3 ways to not make a bloated crap website.

Be willing to be inflexible; skip the frameworks (if you can)

It sure is nice to have bootstrap included for everything, but unless you're making something complex, it's really not worth including at all. In this case, I've made a customized bootstrap grid + reboot css file that only contains what I think I'll need, and has everything I'll never use stripped out completely.

Frameworks are a massive help, especially when you're newer to the web. If you don't have a clear vision for what you're designing, or want the flexibility a framework gives you, there's no harm in doing what makes sense.

That's not the point of this post though.

Don't use big ol' javascript libraries

In the ever-increasing urge to become a blogging mother, finding a blog software that does what you want while not being too bloated can be an insurmountable task.

For example, if you want to use Wordpress, you have to choose between hosting it yourself (much more control over it, but requires you to have some knowledge of installing web software and requires that you have hosting already) or using wordpress's managed hosting @ https://wordpress.com/ .

Then, once you have figured out how to get a blog set up, you have to deal with the fact that there's only a handful of good themes, and that your blog will look the same as everybody else's that uses that theme, and that it's pretty difficult to modify the themes in any meaningful way.

To make matters worse, theming is much harder in Wordpress because of how complex and old it is. Sure, it's got pretty good documentation - but who wants to spend 10-20 extra hours implementing a design into a wordpress theme?

The second best alternative seems to be static site generators - they are usually super simple to theme, but they have the limitation that you can't usually author their content on the web in an accessible way, and there's absolutely no true dynamic content you can put on it (eg a proper search, though you should probably defer to google anyway for that).