July 31, 2025
Web pages are probably the best way that humans have found to share information. You can read them with almost any electronic device from almost anywhere on the planet. They update instantly, without wasting any paper. They have interactivity and multimedia that make them the easiest way to do anything from buying an airline ticket to watching a movie. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can make one.
Part of what helped make the web so successful was the fact that its core technologies are pretty easy to understand. Even before the web hit the mainstream in the 1990s, there were already uncountable pages dedicated to all types of human endeavors. Web 1.0 had its flaws, but it was a very exciting and free place, full of homespun pages very clearly created by everyday people with a simple desire to share information.
Now, decades later, we’ve become disconnected from the ability to build pages from scratch. Our sites have become much better, but they’ve also become much, much more complicated and understanding them is out of reach for even most nerds.
These days, most people use pretty complex software to build sites, either a blogging platform like WordPress or a graphical subscription product like Squarespace or Wix. These tools almost universally start you off with a template.
And templates are great, for most people. You get a full web site very quickly and you can immediately start adding in your own content, which is certainly the most important thing anyway. Maybe that’s what you want, and if that’s the case, you have a lot of options that are probably a better fit for you than Hot Page.
The problem with templates is that they put you in a straightjacket. As soon as you adopt it, you’re basically stuck with what’s there, especially when you don’t understand how it works. And that’s the case for pretty much anyone who’s ever used a template, because if they did understand how it works, they wouldn’t need it.
Of course, the no-code builders like Squarespace let you customize your colors and a whole lot more. But as soon as you want to create anything even slightly out of the box, you end up fighting your tools. That’s true even if you’re using a powerful almost-code builder like Framer or Webflow.
Even worse, you’re spending a lot of time learning about your tool and very little time learning about how web sites actually work. Ironically, that’s the very thing that would help you accomplish your goals. Then the next version of the tool comes out and your skills are now useless.
At their core, web pages are very simple primitives that can be used for an infinite number of things. What would you, dear reader, like to do with all those possibilities?
These magical, as-yet uninvented things are only possible when you are comfortable starting with a page that has nothing on it. If you want real possibilities, you can’t just take what’s handed to you in a template.
The truth is that it’s pretty uncomfortable to sit with an empty page in front of you while you channel your creativity. Sit there for just a moment. It’s going to be worth it, because constructing a web page from scratch is fun. It’s remarkably satisfying to put the pieces together, make something unique and learn more about the technology as you do it.
Writing your page from scratch is always going to be more fulfilling than trying to cajole something that is too complicated for you to understand. You will also make something unique and you will feel more ownership of your work because it’s truly yours.
Web pages have never been this awesome: animation, vector graphics, variable fonts, grid layouts, even 3D. We suffered through in the 90s and now we’ve finally got all the fun stuff.
Pages really shine when they take full advantage of the medium. No matter their content, it can always be brought to the next level with the combination of great typography, graphics, tasteful animation, video, audio and interactivity.
That level of customization is not possible when you start with a template or a template-based CMS. The result is that in general, the possibilities of the web are woefully underused, whether it’s for news, marketing, blogging, education, commerce or whatever else.
Indeed, most of our time online is siloed in platforms where content is only shown in a handful of formats. These corporate-controlled spaces get the benefits of our contributions while robbing our attention with addicting algorithms. They are managed by people with enormous greed, who spend their winnings tracking us and manipulating us to consume more. Designers are designing for advertising; coders are coding for surveillance.
Hot Page is for people who want to make truly astounding and unique web pages. It’s an editor where you can do everything the web can do. It has all the power of writing code, only just a bit easier to manage.
Surely you’ve heard of HTML, the fundamental language of the web that turns plain text into links or
headings with tags like <a> or <h1>. It’s at once very easy to understand and
write, and at the same time, a goddamned pain in the ass. You have to write closing tags (</a> and
</h1>) and they better match up or all hell will break loose. Even writing a quotation mark the
correct way requires you to remember a fancy escape sequence. And most people who still write HTML do so in
a code editor, using a fixed-width font that looks like it came out of a typewriter.
Hot Page surfaces the “good parts” of web technologies as they already exist — and smooths out the sharp corners on the rest of it with a better user interface.
On Hot Page, you edit real HTML. You’re not building your website using an abstraction of a web page as you would in a visual editor — you’re writing the same stuff that your browser uses to read and display pages. But you don’t have to write actual code. You see your images as images instead of URLs. You are playing with the same primitives but without having to deal with the ugliness, the awkwardness and much of the finicky nature of coding.
This approach unlocks a number of really cool things: you’re now learning real web tech as you use it. You can now use any of the open source front-end code on the Internet (there’s a lot of it, including templates if you want them). You can also get help from any AI language model because they all know how to write HTML already. And if you get tired of paying for Hot Page, you can just download your site and edit it in a text editor, host it on your own server or incorporate it into another workflow.
Of course, Hot Page is not for everyone or every project. It’s for people who are curious how things work and who are willing to invest a little bit of time in their efforts. It’s for the perfectionists who need complete control. And it’s certainly not for people who are too busy to be creative or don’t have the attention to care about the details.
Hot Page is also a stand against Big Tech. I’m building it because I want to help people invest their effort in something that rewards attention with knowledge and positivity, not poison. The web is the original digital platform, but crucially, it’s an open platform. That means that no one person or company controls it. It’s what you and me, the people who build web pages, make it.
Hot Page has no venture capitalists behind the scenes. It doesn’t even have investors, except for me and a few of my friends who are helping out with their own labor. We aren’t trying to conquer all of the world’s attention with our software. We don’t even aim to be huge or anything of the sort. We just aim to be good.