How I built a 200+ page philosophy website with plain HTML, CSS and JS (and what I learned about SEO)

Kavya Jain — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:05:54 +0000

I wanted a portfolio project that showed real digital marketing skills, not just a template. So I built the Library of Philosophy, a multi-page site covering thinkers, schools, branches and history, using only HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript.

The stack

HTML, CSS and JS only, with shared style.css and script.js across pages.
GitHub Pages for hosting
Formspree for the contact form (submitted with fetch())

SEO decisions that mattered

One clear H1 per page, with the primary keyword in it.
H2s written as questions, with the answer in the first sentence (good for featured snippets and AI answers).
JSON-LD schema: Person + FAQPage on thinker pages, ItemList/Book on the books page.
Title tags around 60 characters, meta descriptions around 155.
Image SEO: clean filenames, descriptive alt text, lazy loading.
Internal linking between related thinkers, schools and branches.

What went wrong

Broken image paths and an undefined CSS variable took me longer to catch than I'd like to admit.
One page got strong impressions in its first days and then dropped, which taught me to audit on-page, technical and content depth separately instead of guessing.

What's next
Building backlinks, adding a blog, and expanding the schools pages.

Live site:https://libraryofphilosophy.com/index.html

I'd love feedback on the structure. What would you change?

DEV Community: Kavya Jain

How I built a 200+ page philosophy website with plain HTML, CSS and JS (and what I learned about SEO)