My previous website was quite barren and I was never really proud to show it off, so I decided to take some time
and completely revamp it before the school year began. I had originally planned to build the new site using
AngularJS, but ended up not needing any of its features and sticking with plain old HTML/CSS/jQuery.
Building it from scratch instead of using a template as I had done before meant that I had full control over
the site layout and structure, which was a pretty neat experience and actually went faster than expected, taking less than a day. I’m
still hoping to make improvements to the site, but I’m happy with the progress so far.
Thoughts on some site elements:
- Jekyll + GitHub Pages
- If you have some experience with web development, I’ve found this to be the best combination for hosting a
convenient, fast, and updatable static website. I haven’t done extensive research on other options, but this
combination works quite well for me.
- Jekyll provides a lot of neat features such as built-in
markdown parsing, a templating engine (Liquid), and a Sass compiler.
- GitHub Pages provides Jekyll support, a really easy to use uploading system (just push to the git repository), and is FREE.
- Skeleton CSS
- This is probably my new favorite CSS framework for building sites designs from scratch. Although it doesn’t contain as many elements as in something like Bootstrap, Skeleton CSS doesn’t impose much of its own style, but rather focuses on providing layout elements. This means that it’s a lot easier to add your own styles to the page, while still saving a lot of time on things like forms and responsive columns.
- Single page navigation (except for posts)
- Since I didn’t have a large amount of content for the site, I decided to keep everything on a single page,
with an animated jQuery accordion for navigation. I did this to make navigation easier, and so that I didn’t
end up with a bunch of pages each having minimal content.
- Sass
- This is my first time using Sass in a completed project, and it definitely made writing the CSS a lot easier, with neater code.
I’m still no front-end expert, but I’m happy to have a semi-completed website for once. Stay tuned for more.
Visit my homepage