I am writing this to go over both the good things and bad things I often come across on small websites, the kind often made by just some random person in a basement. The funny part about it is all the bad things I will go over are not limited to indie websites but are instead echos of the mainstream web that have sadly been leaking into everything else. A lot of what I have to say are things discovered through umatrix. Often times we only see the outside of a website but when using a good content blocker like umatrix, noscript, ublock advanced mode... the inner workings of a website is brought into the light. What I often find isnt pretty. Sometimes a website is themed to look old school but under the hood its just a bunch of modern javascript bullshit and a hell ton of frames. Other times more modern looking websites have little to no javascript and instead use tastefull first party css to get that look.
From what I have seen neocities users love to abusive hot linking all the way to the deepest depths of hell. Every single button, blinky, gif, meme... on their frontpage is hot linked. Its perfectly ok to make your viewers suffer with too much of that shit. I do the same. But please download all the images and gifs into your image folder instead of hot linking them. Here is why:
Its best to not use javascript at all. Though if you are addicted to the drug javascript and cant help yourself at least try to limit your use of it. That means all static content needs to be accessible without javascript. No using javascript for fancy drop downs, no using javascript to handle your layout, no using javascript just to get text and images into the screen, no using javascript for basic animations...