Decisions that endure versus trendy choices that date quickly.
Structural decisions, not decorative ones. They were never fashion, so they never went out of it.
Borrowed appeal from the moment. When the moment moved on, the site looked stuck in it.
The first real website I ever built was for my dad's organization, back around 1999. It replaced something that was barely a website — a placeholder, really, not an actual presence online.
A year later I rebuilt it, and I was proud of that version. It was a real step up — cleaner layout, real structure, something that finally looked like someone had designed it on purpose.
Then a couple years went by, and it looked dated. Not broken, not embarrassing. Just visibly stuck in its moment, in a way a good site shouldn't be. Nobody taught me that lesson in a class. I learned it by watching my own work go stale: trends age. Structure doesn't.
Trends age. Structure doesn't.
By 2003 I was rebuilding that same site a third time, plus a second one alongside it — an online store for the same organization. That's where I started asking a different question before I built anything: will this still make sense in five years, once whatever's trendy right now isn't anymore?
I still build that way today. I don't ask whether something looks current. I ask whether it'll still hold up after the current look doesn't — that's really the whole difference between a site that ages and a site that just quietly keeps working.
The hardest part of the work is leaving things out.
How templates make decisions on the user's behalf, whether you notice or not.
Tell me about your business and what you need your site to do.