A ‘Web site’ was historically a collection of documents. Each document, much like an article in a newspaper, magazine, or academic journal, was a standalone entity. The great innovation of the World Wide Web was in allowing documents to connect to one another — such connections are called ‘hyperlinks’.
The utility of hyperlinks led to the development of a new kind of Web site in the Web 2.0. These new ‘websites’ were not a collection of standalone documents with links to one another, but rather a single entity with multiple pages. The change from documents to pages had a profound effect. Documents, being stand alone entities, can vary in design, layout, and style from one to the next. There is no requirement for more cohesiveness than you would get from a corporate style guide. Further, you would expect documents created at different times to have different styling, in much the same way that a brochure from 1995 looks different to one from 2025. There is no need to go back and update old documents as your style guide updates.
Pages, however, all belong to a single document. Thus, with the change from a Web site to a website came a requirement to ensure consistency across all the pages of that website. There was a need for consistent navigation bars, footers containing legal information, styling, layout, and so forth. If the style guide changed, the entire website needed updating all together. However, the fundamental nature of HTML as being a markup language for self-contained, hyperlinked documents (rather than for pages or sections of a larger document, like LaTeX) was unchanged. This made the process of maintaining consistent styling across all the pages of a large website cumbersome and unwieldy. To solve this problem, templating, content management, Wordpress, and all the rest comes in. (See, for example, ‘The Problems a Generator Solves’ here.)
I am not a Luddite. Tamarind’s website is a perfectly modern thing done in Wordpress (though I would like to move away from that particular content management system and to something a bit lighter and streamlined). However, this website — my personal website — is supposed to be focussed on text-based content and is intentionally tech-light. To achieve this, there is no CMS nor is there any templating. I could attempt, nonetheless, to manually maintain consistent navigation and styling across the site. However, this would be pointless. If I wanted to do that, the correct tool would be server-side includes (at the least).
Instead, I have chosen to lean into the Web 1.0 design philosophy. The homepage is the index page: it contains links to all the documents in the root folder of the site. Each document is a standalone thing, with a title, author, date, and a link back to the index page. I’ve also attempted to lean into this feel with the styling (or lack thereof). Though, as I say, there is nothing stopping different documents on this site from having very different styling. If nothing else, I hope it is something of a love-letter to a simpler Web populated mostly by individual people who didn’t really know what they were doing, and the odd quirky business trying to muddle along without a legion of designers and marketers.
See also: Prof. Dr. Style, an article on the ‘academic’ style of web ‘design’ from the 90s.