Yes, that&#x27;s the standard answer: good structure costs very little now but pays off greatly in maintenance and upkeep.<p>And I believe it -- up until a point. After that point, too much structure becomes its own kind of hindrance, where you&#x27;re looking at a UI and wondering &quot;What the hell cascades do I have going on here to make that two pixels too far to the right?&quot; (Or something like that)<p>So I don&#x27;t think we disagree. The only thing I&#x27;m adding is that to determine the right amount of structure, add it in only as needed. So I imagine by the time you got to a multi-page site you&#x27;d be using external stylesheets and common classes. You just wouldn&#x27;t start there.<p>Sure do like me some Bootstrap, though. And a good reset sheet is a no-brainer. Need to think about this some more. I think the key question is: how much of this do you really need?<p>For instance, right now I&#x27;m writing a small personal app to take a movie script in native file format and display it as a web page. Where did I start? With the function to do the translation, of course. Now that it&#x27;s working, I can always manually execute it if I need to. I may just stop here. I&#x27;ve done enough.<p>If I really, really want something I can upload scripts to online, I&#x27;ll write a page. Or two. Then I&#x27;ll throw my uploaded file at my pre-existing function, return the file name, and I&#x27;m done.<p>I may have spent 10 hours on this so far.<p>By contrast, the &quot;old&quot; way of doing it was to start with setting up a site using all sorts of frameworks. Maybe decide on a color scheme. On the back-end side, I&#x27;d be creating a class graph and working through my persistence strategy. Maybe I could use Mongo! Wouldn&#x27;t Ruby be awesome?<p>I tend to easily get focused on tooling and technique instead of just doing the fucking work. (Apologies for the profanity, but this took me a long time to figure out). So I&#x27;ve discovered for my own work, I need to concentrate on making sure I grow only the needed complexity. Nothing more. Way too easy for me to screw up in this area.<p>In the case of my little app, sure, I could start adding frameworks. Or I could just emit some HTML. Who knows? Maybe plain HTML with a few classes and some style information in the HEAD might be fine. That&#x27;s a win.