Quickly styling very simple websites

If you have a basic webpage that should look nice, use these tools & tricks

Sometimes I find myself with a very simple site (think: project documentation) and the need to make it look reasonably nice. In this case, I don't want to add frameworks and libraries and CI/CD pipelines, but I also don't want to spend hours hand-crafting CSS. Here is my bag of tricks for this scenario:

• First, my three favorite drop-in CSS "libraries" for text-based pages, all very tiny:

  • Yorha CSS for a unique, simple vintage look

  • Water CSS for when I want a little bit of character

  • Simple.css when I just want readable text with a very muted style

• If it's more like an app, I use Bulma. Feels like Tailwind, but no build step.

• If I don't event want to use any libraries, I use...

  • ...100 Bytes of CSS to look great or 58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

  • ...some layouts from Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS

• To add color while preventing myself from starting to endlessly fiddle with hex values, I use the Web Color Wheel

• Lastly, if I do want to write the styles myself, I usually start with normalize.css and then open a style tag