Website Revamp for 2025

01 February 2025

Welcome to my all-new, redesigned website built from the ground up for 2025.

Why did I redesign my website? The old design was fine, it had a few weird formatting issues but it did its job so I never bothered to fix it. With the new year approaching, I wanted to get back into blogging. It had been more than a year since I launched my website and blog, with the goal of writing one post every week. That streak did not last very long, and I stopped blogging entirely after October. I learned that weekly blogging probably wasn't the right approach for me, but I still very much wanted to write. However, I wasn't really proud of how my website looked and that became a demotivating factor. I figured it was time for a new design.

The biggest change is probably the homepage, which is no longer a long scrolling feed of my posts. Instead, it's more of an about page with a quick bio and links to the blog and project pages. The homepage feels a little empty currently, although I plan to build it out over time as I add new types of content to the website.

I've changed the body font to something a little futuristic and nerdy, I think it suits me quite well. This new design also incorporates more colours. I originally had a colour palette that looked great to me but turned out to have terrible contrast. I've modified it to improve readability, it's not quite the original vision I had but still gets the job done in adding visual appeal and contrast.

For the sake of history, here's what the old website, or the 2024 design looked like:

Now not only did I redesign my website, I also rewrote the thing from scratch and made some changes to the backend as well.

The first and smaller change is that I moved my domain from Hover to Cloudflare domains. I signed up for Hover at a discount back in 2023 after an ad read on a Relay show. In the last two years it's been rock solid, the control panel interface is easy to use and I have no complaints. I even paid for a second year at the full price of $18.99 USD. However, I recently discovered that Cloudflare offers domain registration for only $10.44 USD/year, so with my domain renewal approaching I figured I'd give Cloudflare a try and save a little money which I plan to put towards some new side projects.

The second and much more major change is that I rewrote the website using Eleventy. The old website was built using the Publish static site generator. As a Swift developer and fan of John Sundell's work, Publish seemed an obvious choice when I wanted to build a website. Unfortunately, development on the project has been inactive (the last commit to the repository was 2 years ago) and there isn't a lot of documentation or a large community around it so I struggled to add new features or changes beyond the basics.

Eleventy, on the other hand, is highly customisable and versatile, has lots of documentation and a large community with tutorials, source code and plugins available so it seemed like an easy choice. So far I've been very happy with it, I got a fully functioning website up and running over a weekend. Now that I've got a basic understanding of how Eleventy works, I should be able to easily add new content sections and new features through plugins.

So that's how I got to where the website is today. I'm excited and looking forward to this next year of blogging. With a fresh website built on a new foundation, it's now easier than ever to share my thoughts with the world and expand the website to meet my needs. I won't set any goals this time, I'll just write when I have something worth sharing, seeing where it takes me. I'm glad to have you along the ride.