HOUR ONE
Looked at his website properly
Seven kilobytes of CSS. No JavaScript at all. Four pages that load before your finger leaves the mouse. I had been prepared to be smug and instead sat quietly for a moment.
Lilly Adkins
Zero dependencies
My dad built a website. He mentioned that he made it entirely with a large language model. He mentioned it more than once. So I built this one.
01 — Measurements of a website
The numbers, reluctantly
I don’t think a website should be reduced to statistics. I have, however, collected them, formatted them, and animated them.
0
Dependencies
Not one. No framework, no library, no font service.
0
External requests
This page never contacts another server. Not even for a typeface.
452
Lines of JavaScript
Hand-written. His site has none at all, which is admittedly also a strategy.
4
Live font axes
Optical size, weight, softness, and wonk. Wonk is a real axis. I checked.
2
Easter eggs
Findable. One of them is on this page, above.
L
No photograph. This site is about itself.
02 — Why this exists
It started as a comment
My dad runs a self-storage company. He built its website himself, and he was proud of it, and he was right to be. It loads instantly, it says exactly what it needs to say, and it does not waste a single byte.
He also mentioned — warmly, repeatedly, at length — that he had made the whole thing with a large language model, and that it had taken him no time at all.
So this is a reply. Same tools, different priorities. His site is a business explaining itself to customers. This one is a website explaining that it has a rotating wax seal, a constellation field, and a confetti cannon, none of which anybody requested.
Everything on this page is a fact about this page. I couldn’t bring myself to invent achievements, so instead I measured the only thing actually in front of me: the website.
He is still comfortably ahead on the part that matters, which is running an actual business with actual buildings in it. I want that on the record before you scroll any further.
03 — The build log
How an afternoon disappeared
A truthful account. Every one of these actually happened while making this page.
HOUR TWO
Chose a typeface with a wonk axis
Fraunces has four variable axes, one of which is literally called WONK and makes the letterforms slightly stranger. There was no argument for needing this. It went in immediately.
HOUR THREE
Discovered a forty-pixel margin
Browsers give <figure> a 40px side margin by default. Nobody resets it. It was quietly shoving the testimonials 64 pixels off the side of every phone screen. Found only because the layout was tested at three widths instead of admired at one.
HOUR FOUR
Self-hosted the fonts, largely out of spite
Loading fonts from Google means handing a third party your visitors’ IP addresses. Subsetting and self-hosting them cost a few hundred kilobytes and deleted an entire section of the privacy policy. Worth it for the sentence “zero external requests” alone.
HOUR FIVE
Found the page was blank without JavaScript
Every scroll-reveal section sat at opacity: zero forever if scripting was off — the page was, technically, empty. Fixed properly. His site, having no JavaScript to disable, was never capable of this mistake.
STILL GOING
Wrote a colophon about all of it
A whole page documenting the construction of a website that exists to win an argument. Nobody asked for the colophon either. It is, I think, the most honest thing here.
04 — Awarded by me, to me
Selected accolades
There was no judging panel. There was no shortlist. There was, at no point, anybody else involved.
Best Website In This Family
Unanimous decision
The vote was held privately, by me, and carried by a single ballot. My father has requested a recount. The request is being reviewed by the same panel.
Most Gradients Deployed
No competing entries
Four drifting colour fields, a film-grain layer, a cursor spotlight and a canvas of moving points. The other site in this category uses one flat navy. It ran unopposed and still lost.
Heaviest Use Of A Variable Font
Four axes, all live
Most sites that ship a variable font use one axis and call it a day. This one drives optical size, weight, softness and wonk from the stylesheet. You cannot see three of them. I can.
Most Restraint Shown
Declined, with regret
I was not eligible. The confetti cannon disqualified me in the first round, and the rotating wax seal meant there was no realistic appeal.
Best Bug Nobody Would Have Seen
The forty-pixel margin
A default browser margin quietly breaking every mobile viewport, hidden behind an overflow: hidden that made it invisible. Caught by testing rather than by looking. Genuinely the best moment of the build.
Most Likely To Come Up At Dinner
Ongoing
Awarded in advance, on the strong expectation that this website will be raised at a family meal by me, unprompted, within the week. The category has never had another nominee.
05 — Independently assessed
The Overkill Index
A measure of how much of this website needed to exist. Higher is worse. This is the only chart here I am not proud of.
9.7
Out of ten
- Distinct animations on this page
- Eleven
- Strictly necessary
- Zero
- Colour themes
- Two
- Themes anyone requested
- Zero
- Typefaces self-hosted and subset
- All four
- Held back from a perfect 10.0 by
- Loading quickly
06 — Purely for reference
Competitive analysis
Measured against a certain other family-operated website. Conducted in a spirit of love, and with a scoring system I designed myself.
| Metric | This website | The other one |
|---|---|---|
| Animation | Eleven kinds, all reduced-motion aware | Load-bearing stillness |
| Colour themes | Two, with a toggle that remembers | One, permanently, confidently |
| External requests | Zero. Fonts and all. | Also zero, by not having features |
| Typography | A self-hosted variable serif, four axes live | Segoe UI, and it knows what it did |
| Easter eggs | Two, findable | The mystery is part of the charm |
| Page weight | 373KB, mostly typeface | 1.4MB, mostly uncompressed photographs |
| Time to first paint | Fast | Faster. 11KB of HTML and CSS, system fonts. |
| Actually runs a real business | No | Yes. Six locations. Genuinely impressive. |
| Feelings hurt | Zero. This is affection. | Zero. Hi, Dad. |
07 — Reactions, unsolicited
What people said
Gathered from a small and biologically related sample group.
It’s very animated.
My father
Asked for comment. Declined to elaborate.
There is a rotating wax seal at the top. I don’t know what you want me to say about that.
A friend
Shown it without warning
She measured both websites, found out his was four times heavier than hers, and has not stopped saying the word “kilobyte” since.
My mother
Neutral party, allegedly
I pressed the circle thing and it threw confetti at me. Then I did it eleven more times.
A cousin
Found easter egg one
Loads in under a second. I timed it. Then I timed his, and quietly moved the conversation on to total page weight.
The author
Unprompted, to no one
I preferred the storage one. You can see the prices.
My grandmother
The only review that counts
08 — Asked frequently
Questions, fielded
Is this entire website just to one-up your dad?
Yes. That is the complete and only reason it exists. I appreciate you asking directly rather than dancing around it for six sections the way the rest of this page does.
Is his website actually bad?
No, and I want to be clear about this. It’s clean, it loads in an instant, it says what a customer needs to know and nothing else, and it wastes nothing. Judged as a business website — which is the only fair way to judge it — it is better at its job than this one is at anything. It simply does not have a rotating wax seal, and that is the hill I chose.
Which site is actually heavier?
I assumed his was, and wrote a whole section conceding the point, and then I measured it. His home page loads 1.4MB — five photographs straight off a camera, the largest a single 419KB JPEG. This entire website, four self-hosted typefaces included, is 373KB.
So his largest photo is bigger than my whole site. I spent an hour subsetting fonts to save fifty kilobytes. He could have saved eight hundred by resizing one picture of a building.
He still paints faster, to be fair — his HTML and CSS come to 11KB and use fonts already on your machine. First paint is his. Total weight is mine, and I intend to bring it up.
How was this built?
Hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no dependencies, no tracking, no cookies, and not one external network request. Roughly 39KB of CSS and 452 lines of JavaScript. Full breakdown on the colophon, because of course there is one.
Are the numbers on this page real?
Yes — that is the one thing I was strict about. Every figure here describes this website and was measured from the actual files: the dependency count, the request count, the line count, the font axes, the easter eggs. The jokes are jokes. The measurements are measurements.
Are there really easter eggs?
Two. The seal at the top of this page is a button, and it does something. The other is the Konami code — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. There’s a message in the browser console as well, but mentioning it would be showing off.
Does he know about this?
He does now.
09 — If you must
Do get in touch
Corrections, complaints, and rival websites all welcome. Particularly rival websites.
core@lillyadkins.com