On craft
This website
More considered typography, real theme support, motion that respects accessibility settings, and no third party ever learning who visited. These are genuine wins and I am keeping them.
The full accounting
Head to head
Every category I could think of, including the ones I lose. Scored by me, which is the only methodological flaw worth declaring.
11
Categories won
By this website, on criteria this website selected.
4
Categories lost
Including, unfortunately, the important ones.
1
Actual businesses run
Not by me.
Round one — Craft
Where I win
These are real differences, measured from both sites on the day this page was written. They are also, to be fair, differences nobody shopping for a storage unit has ever once wanted.
| Category | This website | The other one |
|---|---|---|
| Typography | Fraunces, four variable axes driven live | Segoe UI, whatever your machine has |
| Colour themes | Two, system-aware, remembered | One navy, unwavering |
| Motion | Eleven kinds, compositor-only properties | None whatsoever |
| Reduced-motion support | Everything disabled at the source | Vacuously perfect, having no motion |
| Font delivery | Self-hosted, subset, axis-instanced | System fonts, delivered by your OS |
| Social preview card | Custom 1200×630, rendered from the real stylesheet | Whatever the link unfurls into |
| Easter eggs | Two, plus a console message | Zero, confidently |
| Pages documenting itself | One entire colophon | None, because why would you |
| Total page weight | 373KB, four typefaces included | 1.4MB on the home page alone |
| Image optimisation | One 79KB social card, and nothing else | Five photos straight off the camera |
| Rotating wax seals | One | None |
His largest single photograph is 419KB. This entire website, four self-hosted typefaces included, is 373KB.
I spent an hour subsetting fonts to save fifty kilobytes. He could have saved eight hundred by resizing one picture of a building. I have chosen to find this funny rather than instructive.
Round two — Everything else
Where he wins
I considered leaving this section out. That felt like it would prove his point rather than mine.
| Category | This website | The other one |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first paint | Fast | Faster. 11KB of HTML and CSS, and fonts already on your machine. |
| Ways it can break | 452 lines of them | Essentially none. No JavaScript, no bugs. |
| Serves a paying customer | Never has, never will | Daily, across six locations |
| Reason for existing | Winning an argument | Renting storage to people who need it |
The verdict
Eleven to four
On engineering judgement
The other one
He wrote 11KB of HTML and CSS and then stopped, which is the harder discipline and the one I abandoned in hour two for a font axis called wonk. He then undid most of it by uploading five photographs at full camera resolution, so we are both guilty — just in different files.
Overall
Contested
I win on the scoreboard I built. He wins on the one that pays for things. I have decided this makes me the winner and have declined all requests to revisit the criteria.
In all seriousness
His site is good
He built a clean, fast, clear website for a real business with a tool he’d just picked up, and it does its job better than most sites built by people who do this for a living. Every joke on this page is affection wearing a lab coat. The scoreboard is rigged and we both know it.