20 years of Building David Ligare’s Website

Some websites are designed to constantly reinvent themselves. Others quietly do exactly what they were meant to do from the very beginning.

For nearly 20 years, I’ve been building and maintaining the website for painter David Ligare. In internet years, that’s practically prehistoric. Entire platforms have come and gone during that time. Trends have exploded, vanished, and reappeared wearing different clothes. Flash died. Mobile arrived. Social media took over. Then came page builders, plug-ins, subscriptions, and websites so overcomplicated they require constant maintenance just to stay online.

David’s site stayed simple. That simplicity has always been intentional.

The purpose of the website was never to overwhelm visitors with animations, pop-ups, or layers of navigation. The paintings are the focus. The site exists to present the work clearly, quietly, and respectfully, almost like walking through a gallery.

Under the hood, though, the site has evolved constantly.

While the visual design has remained familiar over the years, the code has been steadily cleaned up, modernized, and simplified. Old legacy code gets stripped away. Broken shortcuts get replaced. Layouts become more responsive. Navigation becomes cleaner. Pages load faster. The newest update added sorting functionality to the paintings section while still keeping everything lightweight and straightforward.

There’s something refreshing about maintaining a website this way in 2026. Modern web design often feels like building a house entirely out of third-party tools. One service changes pricing, another stops support, a plug-in becomes incompatible, and suddenly a simple portfolio turns into a maintenance project. This site avoids all of that.

It reminds me that good design isn’t always about adding more. Sometimes it’s about restraint. Sometimes the best solution is the quietest one.

After two decades, the goal remains the same, create a reliable digital gallery that gets out of the way and lets the artwork speak for itself.