Yeah problem I think is we have all these plug and play solutions that allow people who don’t know who to do it any other way, do things. I often see people including 5 jquery libraries just to do a simple layout thing. That is like 10 lines of CSS. When asked why not use CSS they go oh didn’t know you could do it. I saw someone doing this on a site and thought you had to use jquery to do it.

Use to be you had to know how to code, now it’s turning more into knowing how to plug and play an api into code to do the work for you, but they all come at great costs. Helped one person take a site that was nearly 5 mb in size for default page, down to about 500kb. We started by stripping the 25 libraries he had loaded in but weren’t using. Stripped it down to 1 library and to be honest if he knew how to code some javascript he could of got rid of that one, but I let him have 1, cause it did make his life much easier being a less experienced coder.

The world is changing, which is a good thing I love having GIMP as an option over photoshop and while I am a digital artist. I’m not, no formal training, etc just watch some videos on how to. I find myself daily learning the proper way to do things that I did wrong. Same overall look sorta, but the image is half the size and renders / scales better. So while I scold web developers, I get scolded when I do my digital media. Key is for us to try and teach people to build simple first then add on top of it.
But even that is a challenge. When I build applications for work, I never focus much on formatting or design, just crude layouts, etc while I work to get everything programmed and functioning. Then I go back once everything is hashed out and make it pretty. But every time I go and demo the current state for the bosses they focus mainly on why it doesn’t look great format wise. I get tempted myself to toss in some libraries to quickly make it look pretty, but it’s just a waste. But I can see where having all this free and quick broiler plate seems to pay off. Till you build your 50th site on the same server and have to go buy another one, vs just trimming site size down, or your bandwidth bill actually becomes YOUR problem and not someone elses.