Category — Web Design

Yes folks, you read the title correctly.  I said that you cannot beat good old fashioned HTML.  What am I referring to?  Try to remember the times before Google when everyone was using WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and Yahoo while almost all sites were static and hand-updated with quality, innocent information.  This was a time before affiliate programs and internet advertising was very young.  Yes, those were the good ol’ days.  Now, web content has a higher value than newspaper articles and affiliate links run rampant.

What is the point of this post?

I am going to admit, there are new alternatives in website design utilizing CSS and PHP that can outrank and out perform any static HTML site in a heartbeat, but people with old content-rich static HTML websites are still reaping some profits from the early days of the internet.  There is a reason these sites have done so darn well over such a long time!

Old school HTML is basic, static, and time consuming to make changes.  However, it’s so simple that all search engines can easily crawl and index any content.  Making the crawling easier gives you the first shot at rankings and improves your chances of getting ranked for existing topics and terms.

I’m not really sure how to word this post without pissing a bunch of people off, but basically what I am trying to say is - Based on my personal experience, and historical data, some of my static HTML sites are still outperforming my much larger and more popular CSS, PHP, and dynamically driven sites (Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) that have several more hours of SEO work done to them.

I’d like to get the opinion of what others think about this?  Obviously I am not saying let’s all ditch what we have learned over the years and start creating static HTML sites again, I am just pointing out how successful my older sites have been and still are.  I think the old K.I.S.S. (”Keep It Simple Stupid”) strategy is at work on the internet too!