January 13, 2026
No CSS, All Chaos
How to make a damn website (2024)
One page to rule them all—nostalgia vs nitpicks vs gotchas
TLDR: Louie Mantia urges building a simple site: write one plain HTML page and post it. Comments split between retro cheerleaders, nitpickers insisting it’s just a blog, and pragmatists warning about real-world hosting glitches—showing simplicity is refreshing, but the internet still throws curveballs.
Designer Louie Mantia’s “How to Make a Damn Website” says: skip the bells and whistles, write one page in plain HTML, upload it via FTP (a simple file transfer), and celebrate the Times New Roman vibe. The comment section? Nostalgia royale.
Old-school fans rolled in hot. One grad-school veteran said they rescued a course site with nothing but a CD and grit, and another proudly declared they still use SeaMonkey Composer — yes, the descendant of Netscape — like it’s 1999. Others chimed in with “ditch WordPress” energy, linking Plain Vanilla Web as the manifesto for burn-your-CMS minimalism.
But the haters (or realists) arrived with the cold shower. “Then your host misconfigures caching and half your users see different versions,” warned one commenter, reminding everyone that simple pages still live on messy servers. Cue the semantics fight: “The title should be ‘How to make a damn blog,’” grumbled a purist, poking the difference between “a website” and “a blog.”
The meme machine kicked in: people joked about banning “Hello World,” praising raw blue links, and quoting “a broken escalator is just stairs.” Bottom line: the community’s split between cozy retro vibes and “don’t forget the real-world headaches,” and it’s entertaining.
Key Points
- •A website can be a single plain HTML page and does not need CSS or a CMS to start.
- •Begin by writing an actual blog post in raw HTML using a simple text editor.
- •Avoid setting up a CMS, designing the site, buying a domain, or creating a GitHub repo at the outset.
- •Name the HTML file sensibly, upload it via FTP, and place it in a “blog” folder on the server.
- •Focus on shipping a functional page first; iterate and add complexity later.