From the outside, being early and being weird look exactly the same. Think about it… it makes sense.

Some people call me a nerd. I have a goofy sense of humour, simple clothes, messy hair (what is left of it) and, more often than not, a bad shave. I do not care much about ‘stuff’, but I love beer, art, sports (korfball), design (especially cars) and technology. If you are an agency or a designer looking for someone to build your websites, that last part might be the only thing that matters to you.

In my professional life I am bit weird too, as I have a long track record of doing things before they made sense to the people around me.

Years ahead

In 2001, my twin brother and I built Merlin, a CMS that kept content apart from layout and used a plain text syntax very similar to what Markdown would become three years later. Today that is how half the internet works. In 2014, I built Without Coding, a tool that let graphic designers build a real website the way they would build a design in Photoshop: layers, drag and drop, no code.

A year later, I moved my entire business from WordPress to static websites. Not one site as an experiment: all of it. I went Linux only at the same time, because web servers run Linux and I wanted to truly understand them. By 2020 I was driving an electric car, back when it was something you had to explain at birthday parties. And today, I use AI to cut every step of building a website down until it is as simple and quick as possible.

The pattern is always the same. I will always bet on simplicity, in design and in tech, no matter the cost.

In tech, simple means the fewest moving parts. A static website has fewer moving parts than a WordPress site. Native CSS and plain JavaScript have fewer than a framework. Fewer parts means less to break, less to maintain and less cognitive load. That is where technical excellence starts: with something simple enough to truly understand.

The client always wins

Being early sometimes hurts. I stood at the dark back of a petrol station at night, waiting for a charger, because my first electric car had a range of 200 kilometres on a good day. I spent years fighting Linux drivers. And saying no to WordPress cost me a few clients, who went for the promise of unlimited flexibility and plugins for everything. I wrote about what that actually costs later.

But my clients never paid that price. They always win. A static website is cheaper to build, host and maintain than a WordPress site. No frameworks means lighter pages, and lighter pages load faster and convert better. And Online Magazine Maker is cheaper than Issuu, without ads or branding. Few people know it (I am a terrible marketeer), but my clients still profit from it every day.

Not for everyone

If you want WordPress with a page builder and a pile of plugins, I am not your guy. There are thousands of them, and I do not want to be one more.

My first believers were a handful of designers and marketing agencies. Static websites in 2015 were a hard sell, but with CloudCannon we built almost 300 websites together. Three hundred times, people with no technical background got a website without WordPress, and they liked it. Faster, safer and nothing to maintain.

That proof convinced me to take the next step. I built my own Usecue CMS for Hugo. Today it runs more than 100 websites and publishes a site with hundreds of pages in under two seconds.

What you get

If you join them, you get more than a website. You get an unfair technological advantage: your website is years ahead of the competition, and so are the processes around it. That makes it cheaper to build and to maintain.

In practice, your design becomes a website that loads instantly with better conversion. AI does the heavy lifting and there is very little code to write, so there are fewer hours on your invoice. Hosting and maintenance is included, so there are no plugin updates or security patches for you to worry about. Clients update their own website, in Usecue CMS or by just asking Claude. And feedback no longer comes as screenshots with red arrows: just click on the exact spot on the live page in Annotate.now, and the AI knows exactly what to change, resulting in cheaper and more accurate feedback rounds.

A nerd on your side

The web changes every year. New frameworks, new hypes, new tools that promise everything. You do not have to keep up with any of it. That is my job. And when I find a better way, every website on Usecue CMS gets it, without you lifting a finger.

Here is the thing: I chase technical excellence and simplicity, not money. Most developers do not, because complexity pays better: more plugins, more maintenance, more hours. With me you get a partner who recommends the best solution, not the most profitable one.

Being a nerd is not a pair of glasses. It is the constant urge to improve things by simplifying them. Technical excellence through simplicity is not a catchphrase. It is my way of living.

Weird or early?

So, am I weird, or just early? Both, I think. For twenty-five years I have chosen the simple option before it made sense to the people around me, and most of those choices turned out to be right. I am a nerd, and that is exactly why my clients always won.

Any regrets? Not really. I would not even know how to do it differently. And let’s be honest: I desperately want to be the guy with the unfair technological advantage. The nice thing is, when you work with me, that advantage is yours too: a website that is years ahead, cheaper to build and maintain, and a partner who keeps it that way.

Interested? Let’s talk.

()  Joost van der Schee