… so?

My highschool, for a while, had a website, which was eventually replaces by a large corporate CMS. Was the website as complicated or complex as the CMS? No, you would have needed to know HTML to publish to it. The CMS was no doubt "more user friendly", I suppose.

But … the original site had a soul. It was unique to the school. There was a student directory! All lost, because the CMS meant utter standardization between all the schools using it (their pages were all identical, except for each got like a different picture of the school as the banner at the top) and the CMS did not do directory anything.

Of course, the directory largely didn't matter in the end. (This was when you needed people's landlines! Quite laughable nowadays…) But it was still sad to see it lost, and several of us students worked on it, which provided us with some early real-world experience.

A large number of my college professors published their own sites, too, where they'd put their lecture notes, homework, etc. I loved those far more than I loved "Canvas" or whatever the ugly LMS we used was.