How I rebuilt this website, and why

Every couple of years, I become dissatisfied with my personal website and seek to redesign it and make it better. This happens because, as time goes on, my taste and abilities change, new trends arise, and new technology is created that I want to test out. As a frontend development hobbyist and enthusiast, I use my personal website as a testbed for new technologies - as a way of learning new web technologies and ways to build for the Internet.

While I could use no-code visual site building tools like Webflow / Framer / Wordpress to design my website, I prefer the technical challenge of writing code - even if the output is not as polished as if I use those tools.

I created the first version of my website in 2019. I was just finishing my Master’s programme and starting to job hunt and needed a place for my projects and writing to live. I haven’t pushed a major update since sometime in 2021.

Before and After

So, this year, after an “audit” of the site, there were quite a few things that I felt needed to change, listed below:

• The old website felt like a sales-y website that was optimized for potential employers - putting things like project case studies front and center.
• I felt that it was too clinical and didn’t reflect enough of my personality and the things I liked and was interested in.
• Most projects were outdated.
• The website did not offer any value to visitors in any way (like I said, it was very sales-y).
• There was no CMS, so updating the site meant I had to open VS Code and write code - which very quickly became a blocker for updating the website.

And so I wanted to build a new website that would fix these problems, as well as improve a few things such as:

• Place a focus on my writing.
• Add a CMS for easier updating of the website.
• Use a more “modern” tech stack (see tool stack image).
• Replace Google Analytics with a more privacy-friendly alternative.
• Offer value (downloads, “Let’s Work”).

Next steps

It took me almost 6 months to build the site because I was learning Tailwind and Astro and building at the same time plus I have limited time to build between working all day and spending time with family.

While I was able to get a lot of the new features into this first release of v2, I wasn’t able to get everything in, and honestly I felt like waiting to get everything “perfect” was becoming just another form of procrastination. Hence, I have developed a features roadmap, in order of importance, for the continuous update of the website:

• Add downloads section
• Dark mode
• Add (and display) article categories
• Read time and read progress indicator
• Add page transitions and animations

Finally, if you compare this new site with the old (now archived) site, you will see that, other than fixing some original issues and sitting on new tech, it does look very similar. Well, that just means I have to start redesigning it again.