Writing is low-cost creating!
Writing is the cheapest creative outlet that can change peoples’ minds and even their beliefs.
When we think of hobbies, expenses come to mind, but out of all the creative outlets we can have, writing does not require much more than a place to put our words. Of course, we could just use a pen and paper for the absolute minimum outlay, but sites like this or our own website allow us to write to the world, and thus have an opportunity to let people into our world, or even give them possibilities for changing theirs.
When we write, our words tap into our reader’s world of meaning, and by judicious selection of our words through our narrative, we can help them build up an internal view of what we would like them to see. Now that would appear obvious for fiction, but non-fiction still needs a narrative threading it together so that what we write becomes real for them and something that they want to experience.
And we can do all this in a couple of hours. Think of any other hobby and how long it takes just to prepare to make something, let alone be ready for public display in a couple of hours. And then there is the skillset required to work with each of the materials. Video requires operating cameras and understanding lighting, making graphics to include, purchasing what is needed, managing the other people helping make it all happen, and it still requires word-crafting to build the script.
It is not like we are starting to write from scratch, as most of us have had years or decades to understand the rules of our language and express ourselves to others. We are likely to have had to try to persuade people to our way of thinking, which would have at least taught us some of what works and what does not when it comes to writing. From there we just have to polish our skills, and that we can do over several drafts, so no one has to see our exploratory efforts.
Getting started
So writing might seem like something that is fairly easy to get into, just awaiting somewhere to write. For many, social media sites seem like an easy place to start, as they have already provided all the infrastructure we seem to need. But then there is the feeds, ads and comments, plus all the other means they use to deliberately distract us from doing anything useful for us. Such masses of distractions do not make it easy to write, and they make it just as hard for readers to follow what we write for exactly the same reasons. There is too much competition for attention, so time to look elsewhere.
We may come to somewhere like here, where there seems to be space to express ourselves without feeling crowded in, and allowing long-form writing as the default. Well, while actually writing in it looks sparse, but when we arrive there is a feed and both sides are hemmed in by a myriad other things we could do on the site. Now, there is not much choice but to do this when a site is catering for multiple writers plus all the public blurb about what the site is for and all its housekeeping links. While the platform is not trying to put beartraps out to keep us here, we are competing with everyone else that wants our attention.
Now, for many, this platform may allow them all that they want to do in writing. It is well supported, and can be peaceful while writing their occasional treatises, and we should all be grateful that such places exist for us to simply express our creativity with minimal setup.
Stepping up
However, if we want to build up something more substantial and coherent like a body of knowledge, we have to consider our own website. We might have tried out some drag-and-drop website design tools, but they are clearly not designed for writers as text just seems something tacked onto pictures as if they are secondary. Pictures may attract, but they do not change minds or hearts. For that a narrative is needed and not just a few words, but many. In that world, pictures need to support the narrative, or they are just distraction. That means that some sort of WYSIWYG word-processor-like interface is needed as the flow is almost completely decided by the linear placement of text.
Many website design tools may allow us to dabble in HTML and other web technologies, but in raw form contains what is called markup, and a mistype can break the page. They may provide a display view that shields some of the fragility, but it is still there. And the fragility of the whole page returns every edit session. That is, once a paragraph is created, editing it risks breaking the page. Not likely in a bunch of paragraphs, but start editing a bunch of pages to shuffle content between them sometime later on, as does happen in a body of knowledge as it organically evolves, and then things can break. If MS Word has problems, then page elements with their HTML entrails hanging out all over the place will not fare much better.
A few years ago, HTML started to include a lot of semantic elements, like asides, sections and navigation bars that were visual+structural elements, rather like the pre-existing lists and tables, but allowing much better knowledge presentation. Unfortunately, most platforms have too much investment in their decades old internal structures to risk breaking them to fully adopt the new elements. Even though Medium started at the same time as the HTML5 semantic elements, they are still not here. So while we can create what looks like sections here, they are just formatted text with headings, and a link will not be added to the article’s navigation bar when that pseudo-section is created.
An alternative
Now we come to why I am writing (there is always a writing agenda!), and that is to let you know that I have created a website design toolset called Smallsite Design (SD) that fully takes on HTML5 along with many other facilities to help serious writers build their bodies of knowledge. It is hard to find writers in one place, except in havens such as this, so hopefully I am offering something that many may find of use to them.
However, it is not enough to just offer semantic elements, but to make them stable. In SD, once created, they can only be explicitly deleted. A wrong keystroke inside one may make it invalid, such as not enough or too much text, but not broken, and no other elements are damaged or cease to exist as they were.
Adding a section or subsection automatically adds a link to it in the enclosing element’s navigation bar, creating it if needed. This is the type of useful automation that builds navigable pages that can be drilled down into, as befits a body of knowledge, where readers should be able to skip content they know about or don’t need to look at.
I was a technical writer for 25+ years and so am conversant with managed documentation processes. I have come across some that were nightmares, and mostly those that were designed for enterprises and their bureaucracies. A body of knowledge needs managing, but I have incorporated what is essential for managing them and avoided the bloat of the corporate world.
I designed Smallsite Design to provide structured documentation for the web.
A real site
Of course there are articles, but they can be grouped into parent categories, and even they can be grouped into subsites with their own home page and navigation, allowing visitors to focus upon the topics that interest them most. That means that a site can grow from a home page to a multi-focus site of a couple of hundred pages and be managed and restructured as the site grows, all from within SD, and without the plugins that other content management systems require.
Despite what a plethora of graphics designers and tech web heads on YouTube seem to portray, a standalone website needs more than a home page, which, as a navigation page, should be nowhere near as complex as they make out. Afterall, no one goes to a train hub to look at the pictures on the walls. There are several article types: general articles (including sections, subsections and mini-glossaries), navigation (with cards, catalog or gallery), procedures, multi-choice tests, glossaries, policies, diaries and a contact page with email form. No one wants to build these from scratch in HTML!
Articles can be created from scratch, or cloned from templates or other articles. The article editing stages are WIPs (works in progress), drafts and releases. People can be assigned to write, translate, review or edit, allowing others to help, but not have full access to the site. However, a single-person site operator is facilitated with defaults that favour them, making logging in and fixing a typo take less than a minute.
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There are 100+ user-interface languages, and 500+ locales, and even 25+ installation languages. I did this to try to address the dearth of sites that address the multitude of languages on this earth. The web world is 50% English, with any other at most 10%. Even if the main subsite is English, many sites will want other languages for the more particular demographics they serve. Catering for multiple languages also allows for another target audience, which is online help for app writers. They will typically want to cater for several languages.
Smallsite Design is privacy focussed, and it does that by not using cookies on public pages, only using them for maintaining the few login sessions required, and not allowing plugins or embedded code that other sites will track all your visitors with. Its security is better that most of the big players in most industries, with typical performance of: https://smallsite-design.com/art/a-design-principles/#third-party-test-results/
Accessibility is core to its design, with a checkbox to make a page have larger line height, ragged-endings to lines, slightly higher background tint to reduce glare, underlining of links in the body of articles, and auto-hyphening turned off. All links ensure the setting endures for the whole session, and there is even a way to make the current accessibility and locale be used when following links to another Smallsite Design site. In all pages, including those for management and editing, all controls are reachable and operable by keyboard, even those for adjusting diagram element positions.
The only statistic that Smallsite Design gathers is whether a page has been read for at least 30 seconds (same as Medium = about two paragraphs), sending only the article ID, time and the locale back to the site. This is the most important statistic.
Custom elements
Some useful elements, besides the usual lists, figures and tables, that Smallsite Design provides are:
a. Program — introduced set of lines of monospaced computer code, which can use the colour-selection facility of inline elements to provide colour-coded syntax. Optional comments and line numbers.
b. Diagram — basic canvas on which a variety of elements can be placed, including some with links. This makes it suitable for graphical tables of contents, organisation charts, process diagrams and other simple layouts. The advantage of diagrams over images is that their content can be read by screen readers for the visually impaired and SEO bots. Included are overlays and suboverlays, which can have their own elements and background images, enabling moving multiple elements around.
c. Sequence — up to 12 parts of time-ordered sequence of images, audio, captions and even a pointer. For what might otherwise need a YouTube video for program demonstrations or meditations, a sequence can do from the site with far less bandwidth and resources. No video skills are required, and to cater for other languages, only the audio and captions for them are required, bypassing having to record totally new videos. Elements can be grouped for simpler timing adjustments, audio can be looped and have configurable fade-ins and -outs, and a simple 4-channel mixer is included. Navigation around each part is available.
d. Footnote — paragraph at the bottom of an article accessible by a numbered link at the end of a paragraph, introduction, list item or table cell. Typically for comprehensive citations or bibliographies with links, or extra information that may only be of interest to some readers, but only applicable to the current page.
Some examples
Hopefully you see the advantage in having your own site and might be considering using my Smallsite Design tool to make it happen, so here are some sites you can look at to see what can be built with it:
The product site: https://smallsite-design.com/ (88 articles)
The online help: https://help.smallsite-design.com/ (120+ articles)
The demo site (to see management pages): https://demo.smallsite-design.com/
A series of articles about how to write. (28 articles)
My personal site: https://patanjalisokaris.com/ (300+ articles))
A collage of some real pages from sites:
Cost
US$10 plus local taxes for a perpetual license.
A reality check
Among web techs, Google is supposedly one of the good guys, providing stats with which we can see how our site is performing. What many don’t know is that for small not-so-popular websites, Google will not even list 95% of their pages. That means that other than a home page and a few listings pages, they show nothing, and no one will ever find them in searches. If they cannot point to your own pages, how can you trust them to show you the rest of the web. Google is a fraud, and they are cutting out more of the web in favour of themselves, including by limiting site searches to 200+ pages, and extracting other sites’ content to show in AI-generated mashups on their search results pages, followed by plentiful ads.
Bing used to be a bit better at only 38%, but from August 2023, they now list 100%, so if you want to find gems at the corner of the web, search on Bing. DuckDuckGo sources anonymously from Bing, so for privacy go with them. Recommend them to everyone and give Google a miss.
