What originally attracted me to the base design of the website Terry was running was how simple it was to find what you needed. All the fat seemed to be trimmed and there wasn't an excess of interactable menus hiding information. Granted, interactable menus are fine so long as they're well thought out and easy to navigate. While I'm sure there are plenty of things he considered adding, he likely decided against bloating it in consideration of the end-user. I'm looking to carry that mentality through in my implementation of it.
It's important to me that anyone who wants to use the base of this website for their own purposes can have an easy time going through and seeing how everything was done. There are plenty of websites where their page source is absolutely impossible to dissect due to disorganization and sheer amounts of code not added by hand. I'm sure there are situations where this is necessary, though I'm sure there are many more where it is just wasted space. I'd also like to avoid having to rely on plugins others provide, who knows how available they'll be in the future.
Obviously, it's important to work across both desktop and mobile. The previous two topics of being clean and easy to understand naturally translate well to a decent mobile experience. Obviously, a little more care has to be taken than just those two things, but it makes it a lot easier to work from there. Additionally, I think this website looks wonderful with a dark-mode extension! Just another advantage of clean and simple code.