Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Websites Book

I used to design websites for a living. This year, 2022, marks the 20th anniversary SimpleBits—or more specifically the anniversary of the simplebits.com domain name, which I registered for my blog and later a freelance design studio. In celebration of that milestone, I thought it’d be fun to look back on the past twenty years, documenting twenty bits I learned about HTML, CSS, web design, and freelancing along with the lessons I learned through the course of my career.

This is not a book about code. Nor is it about specific technologies. Nor is it instructional about how to make websites. What I hope it is: A helpful perspective on what making websites entailed in the “early days” of the web through the Web Standards movement of the early 2000’s. Stories from a designer who learned by viewing source over many late nights. You either lived through it as well, and perhaps these stories will be amusing and potentially reassuring, or you’re just starting out now and may benefit from hearing an old guy talk about web history. In which case you are the future and I can’t wait to learn from you.

Regardless, thank you in advance for listening to me ramble on about the old days, with “present day takeaways” amended to help bring the  bits I learned into today’s context. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Like my previous self-published books, this third in the series also has mid-century aesthetics and arguably-artistic doodles. Writing, designing, and illustrating these little hardcovers is truly a labor of love.

• 5 × 7 inches, 96 pages
• Cloth hardcover, foil-stamped
• 2-color offset printed on Munken Lynx 120gsm paper
• Smyth-sewn binding, woven bookmark ribbon

The eBook version includes EPUB and PDF files (fixed layout).