About this website

tl;dr - this is a static website.

Like many people the first websites I ever built were static websites. That was what people did in the early days of The Internet. But than everyone stopped doing static websites because static websites were stupid because dynamic websites were now the thing.

Rather than a file for every page, the recurring html elements were put in templates and the content in a database and a server brought it all together to create the webpage. It was super cool. If you wanted to change the menu structure you just edited the template rather than the numerous files that made up the entirety of your site. These days this is how the vast majority of websites on The Internet work.

But now dynamic websites are stupid and static websites are cool again. I didn't decide this, I was just starting to get the hang of dynamic websites, but this is the way it is now.

All the pages that make up this website are stored in AWS S3, and served from S3 via Cloudfront. The upside to this model of website deployment is three-fold; speed, cost and security. Static websites load faster, cost less and are more secure than dynamic websites.

One obvious downside to a static website is that it's a static website. If you want to edit the header or footer say, you have to change every single html file for the entire site and reupload those files to the site location.

Additionally there is no back-end server to handle various tasks like authorizing users and processing forms. It's to address these problems, and because it's the cool new thing, that some static websites use a serverless back-end.

For this site I created an administration subdomain using AWS API Gateway and Lambda where the underlying site templates can be updated and the entire site recreated to reflect the updates. Other sorts of tasks can also be handled like adding pages and blog posts or processing data from the website itself.