This series is mainly going to be looking at certain things you commonly see on websites and discussing how to achieve similar effects using hand-written HTML and CSS. If all goes well, you should have a static site that you can use to share all the art, stories, updates, opinions, photos, etc. that you want, without the whole thing being a nightmare to manage.
So we aren't going to be doing everything the same or achieving exactly the same results - your site probably won't be perfectly consistent, and not everything you see online is going to be possible this way - but that should only affect how your content is presented, not whether or not it's presentable at all. As long as the content itself isn't inherently interactive, it should still be presentable. (Even then, there are some interactive things possible without scripting, but that's beyond the scope of this article.
If you truly want/need automation, I'll have a few links on getting started with that at the end of this series.
Defining "nightmare" as having to manually make similar edits to a large number of files as a consequence of a single change, the main cause of nightmares in this case would be dependency on external factors, which is what we're going to be trying to minimize.
Generally, this means not putting the same information in a large number of pages, as well as - without being a nightmare defining "nightmare" as having to make manually make identical edits to a large amount of files, we;ll be preventing nightmares two main ways: 1. reduce how often pages need to be edited because of a change 2. reduce how many pages need to be edited because of a change doing either of these lessens the need for the other, so a bunch of pages that never need to be edited are a-ok, and having no other pages be affected by a change is fine no matter how much you make the change. also, for this reason, feel free to go absolutely wild with complexity on your homepage. if you don't have to update anything else because of it, you can do whatever you want with it without worrying about cleanup. - lower your standards one way to help with the first nightmare-prevention method is change your definition of what "needs" to be edited. broken links? outdated contact info? erroneous facts? still probably wanna fix those. but if it doesn't actually impact the reader's ability to enjoy what you're sharing, it doesn't strictly need to be done.