Web pages are essential. They are perhaps the best way that humans have found to share information: You can read them with almost any 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. When I first went online as a kid in the 1990s, there were already uncountable pages dedicated to all types of human endeavors. Web 1.0 had it’s 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 our own pages. Our sites have become much better, but they’ve also become much, much more complicated and understanding them is out of reach to even most nerds.
These days, most people use pretty complex software to build websites, either a blogging platform like WordPress or a graphical subscription product like Squarespace or Wix. These tools are great at what they do, but they tend to shape the content that they publish in what I would consider some unfortunate ways. They save time at the price of quality.
The blogging tools tend to create sites full of pages that all look the same. Instead of editing a web page, you edit text that gets inserted into a template, making hundreds of look-alike pages. On the “no code” website builders, people often pick an off-the-shelf template that lacks coherence with their brand. Small companies typically fail to create a customer experience that matches their stores and advertisements.
Even worse, much of the content on the web today is inside platforms like Medium and Substack or social networks like Facebook and Instagram. It feels hollow compared to the web I grew up with, where your site was your own space.
When you put your content in a platform, you lose pretty much all control over it. At first, Medium had a wonderfully clean reading experience. Now you can’t read anything there without closing the popups bugging you to login or subscribe or showing you the “top highlight.” Thanks, but no thanks.
The irony is that web pages have never been this awesome. Video, animation, vector graphics, variable fonts, even 3D — now we’ve finally got all the fun stuff (without Flash, heh). I don’t know about you, but when I see something that takes advantage of everything that a web page can do, I’m usually blown away. In general, the web as a medium is woefully under used, whether it’s for news, marketing, blogging, education, e-commerce or whatever else.
I believe web pages are at their best when they’re built from scratch with attention to how design can help convey information. Obviously, not every page can be that way, but if that’s your goal, our editor could help you achieve it.
Hot Page has a unique approach to building websites. In fact, that’s the only reason I thought it was worth my time to create it — it’s something I wanted for myself and couldn’t find anywhere.
You’ve probably heard of HTML, the fundamental language of
the web that turns plain text into links and headings with tags like
<a> and <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 have to match up with their opening
tags 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 could have come out of a typewriter.
More than some nostalgic ode to the early days of the Internet, I set out
to build the best way to edit web pages. At first I tried to make it
“easy” by building a new layer that was less complicated. In order to save
you from the vagaries of the CSS animation
property, I built a new way to animate. Turns out, it wasn’t any easier.
And by building a new layer on top of how a browser reads animations, it
was inevitably also more limited.
Instead, today Hot Page surfaces the “good parts” of web technologies as they already exist and smooths out the sharp corners 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 browsers use to read and display pages.
This gives you real power. It’s the power to build any web page that you can possibly imagine. In fact, I used it to build the page you’re reading right now, this entire marketing website, all of the Hot Page documentation and many other things. (If you want to see how I did it, open this page in the editor.)
When you expose these lower-level technologies, you get another benefit: recycling code. On Hot Page, you can use any open source code from anywhere: every CSS framework, custom element, or JavaScript snippet on the Internet. There’s already a lot of stuff for web pages and instead of forcing you to use our idea of a carousel, we let you use any of the hundreds that have already been built.
Perhaps the best part of working with real HTML is that your new skills will be portable. When you get better at Hot Page, you won’t become an expert in the Hot Page way of doing things or the Wix way of doing things, you’ll become an expert in HTML and CSS.
Many of the no-code solutions out there promise magic. “Make your page with no coding hassle,” they say. Well, let’s be honest, it’s never going to be that simple. Layouts are fiddly things and working with them is always going to be somewhat nettlesome, even in Microsoft Word. On Hot Page, I can at least make you a promise that no one else can make: you will be able to figure it out. If your layout isn’t working, it’s because there’s a problem with your CSS and that’s something you will have complete control over—and more help pages, tutorials and documentation than you could ever read to help you get it right. If your layout isn’t working because of the limitations of WebFlow, well, good luck with that.
We have a long way to go before Hot Page reaches its full potential and the experience of using the editor becomes truly easy. Much of the most exciting parts of it are yet to come: integration with Web Components, more tools for editing CSS properties, style attributes, collaboration, integration with the Fediverse, etc. It’s going to be a fun ride and I hope you’ll stick around to see it.
Tim Farnam
Mexico City
December 2023