I've been experimenting with Carrd.co to build a simple one-page guide to Skiathos, one of my favorite Greek islands in the Sporades archipelago. The tool turned out to be perfect for this kind of project since I wanted something clean and straightforward without getting bogged down in code.
The site opens with a hero image of Koukounaries Beach, that stunning stretch of golden sand backed by pine forest that makes Skiathos so distinctive. I kept the introduction brief, just a few lines about why the island stands out: incredibly accessible beaches, lush green landscapes, and that perfect balance between developed tourism infrastructure and genuine Greek character.
I structured the guide into sections to keep everything on one page without overwhelming visitors. The beaches section was essential, covering everything from the famous Lalaria Beach with its white pebbles and natural rock arch (accessible only by boat) to the more family-friendly options like Vromolimnos and Agia Paraskevi. I made sure to mention Banana Beach for those looking for a livelier scene.
For practical information, I added sections on getting there (flights to Skiathos airport, which has one of the most dramatic runway approaches in Europe, or ferry connections from Volos and Thessaloniki), getting around (rental cars, scooters, or the island bus that connects most beaches), and where to stay. I highlighted both Skiathos Town with its charming old quarter and the quieter options along the southwest coast.
Carrd's simplicity really shone here. The drag-and-drop interface made it easy to add image galleries, embed a Google Map showing key locations, and create a clean, mobile-responsive layout. I used one of their minimalist templates and customized the colors to match the island's palette: deep blues for the Aegean, warm terracotta for the traditional rooftops, and soft greens for the pine forests.
The whole project took maybe two hours from start to finish, and the result is a clean, focused resource that loads fast and works beautifully on phones, which is exactly what you want for a travel guide people might reference while actually on the island.
Looking back at what it took to create a website 20 years ago versus what I just did with Carrd, the contrast is almost absurd.
In 2005, if I wanted to build even a simple one-page guide to Skiathos, I would have been writing HTML by hand in a text editor, probably Notepad or maybe Dreamweaver if I was willing to pay for it. Every <div>, every <table> (because that's how we did layouts back then), every bit of CSS had to be typed out manually. Want to center an image? Good luck with the browser compatibility issues between Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and whatever else people were using.
And that's just the markup. Getting the site online meant finding a web host, figuring out FTP credentials, uploading files through FileZilla or some similar client, and hoping you didn't break anything in the process. If you wanted to update a single line of text, you had to edit the HTML file locally, save it, re-upload it via FTP, and then clear your cache to see if it actually worked.
Responsive design didn't really exist yet. Mobile web was WAP and flip phones. You built for desktop monitors at 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution and called it a day. If someone tried to view your Skiathos guide on their Nokia phone, they'd get a tiny, barely-readable version of the desktop site.
Image optimization was manual. I would have needed Photoshop or GIMP to resize and compress photos, save them as JPEGs at the right quality level, and hope the file sizes weren't too large for people on dial-up or early broadband connections.
With Carrd, I dragged and dropped. The tool handled responsive breakpoints automatically. Images got optimized on upload. The site was SSL-secured and CDN-hosted without me thinking about it. Form integrations, if I wanted them, were just toggles. The whole thing was live on a custom domain within minutes.
What took specialized knowledge, multiple software tools, and genuine technical skill two decades ago is now something anyone can do in an afternoon with zero coding knowledge. The democratization is remarkable, honestly. But there's also something I miss about that era: the constraint of having to actually understand how things worked under the hood made you a better builder, even if it was slower and more frustrating.
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