why so plain?

A while back I read a post by Justin Jackson that he published in bare HTML (you can check it out here). That was right around the time when I had just started to create this portfolio, and his message really resonated with me. I was stubbing things out with flat UI, twitter bootstrap, and set up loads of javascript dependencies for fancy effects. The only problem was I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to say.

It really resonated with me that words, ideas, and meaningful information are the heart of web design. If I didn't have anything meaningful to share, why did I expect that hiding behind a slick colorful website was going to change anything? So after that I scrapped everything, and started over on a piece of paper with what I wanted to say.

The problem I quickly encountered is that webpages without markup are hideously ugly. So I scrapped all the frameworks, and went for something where I could have the best of both worlds. I still have yet to encounter a situation where I feel that adding javascript would significantly enhance my content. My backend is just static pages, and I let github automatically host from my public repository (source). I have worked with complex web applications before, and this has been a really fun experiment on the other end of the spectrum.

Cool? Dumb? Let me know what you think, I always like feedback and new perspectives.