Biggest problem with the modern web, largely in terms of search engines but also in website design, is understanding when information can and should just be static. You do not need to query a database every single time you retrieve information that last got updated before we had the internet.
This is the biggest thing I realized when I started working on Born Into TV, like...if I am making an archive of TV Guide information, that information is the same as it was when it was published. The cover artist for a 1981 TV Guide is the same cover artist from the day they printed it. The articles inside have not changed. NOTHING about the content itself has changed. Now, having a database of that information is fantastic, because it makes making these pages a lot easier, it means that if I want to change something about how they're presented I can regenerate all the pages easily, and it means I can do new things with that data. Eventually I will certainly want a way for end users to query that database as well, if they want to find out some sort of information that I didn't think to make a page for or search for some specific piece of info, so the entire site can't necessarily be static. But 99% of the site has no reason NOT to be static.
Why does a page that just shows you the text for an article from TV Guide in 1956 need to query the database every time it loads? Why does it need to be anything other than static html? I can simply run the script I wrote to regenerate that HTML when changes are needed, because they will be very rare. For instance, maybe I don't have a page made yet for a specific article, so I don't want a dead link on the issue page for that article, and later I do have that page so I need that link added. Great, I regenerate it one more time and it can be static again indefinitely!
Especially for a site that is acting as a resource, it gives the page so much more longevity too. No frills html pages are easy for most devices to load and easy for stuff like Wayback to archive. Site goes down? There's a good chance you can still access the info that was on it. And that data is what I'm concerned about.
