Rebuilding the Website

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about completely redesigining this website from the ground up. I didn't like the colors that much, and it generally wasn't as performant as I would've liked.

I was super busy working on wsh at that time, so I held off from reworking anything. But after deciding to take a short break from the project, I got time to do work on this website!

In this post, I'll go over what's different and what's stayed the same!

What's Different

The whole website is now made with 11ty, which I could not recommend enough. I'd previously used SvelteKit for the blog, but this was completely unnecessary for a few reasons:

  1. The content of this website is (and will probably always be) static
  2. The website is too small to make meaningful use Svelte's component abstractions
  3. There was little to no use of interactive JavaScript

In my first iteration of this website, I didn't know much about developing "real" sites for the web, so I just chose SvelteKit because it sounded nice. This just turned out to be huge overkill and made things much more complicated than they needed to be.

11ty is a super simple static site generator. It handles the annoying stuff for you (like parsing Markdown), while still allowing you to have full control over your website. It doesn't do anything crazy under the hood, or deliver any client-side JavaScript. For building static websites, I can't recommend it enough.

Color Changes

Perhaps the most visually noticable difference is the colors and general site layout.

The old website home page

The home page looks pretty different now! I think both color schemes worked pretty well for a personal site, but I wanted something different for this version of dzfrias.

Projects Page

New to this website is my projects page! This is meant to hold the projects that I'm most proud of. Although they vary in levels of usability (I think I'd be able to make some of them a lot better if I tried them now), I still want to feature the projects that I've poured tons of hours into.

Backend

Since this site is fully static, it's now being served using GitHub Pages! I was previously using Vercel. Similar to the 11ty/SvelteKit story, using a dedicated server was a bit overkill.

I use a GitHub Action for deploying my website. The relevant workflow is nice and simple!

What's the Same

I tried to make sure that all of the URLs of the site stayed the same. For most of the content, that was definitely successful. A few minor pieces of content, like image paths, are not consistent with v1 of the website.

It's generally good practice to make sure that your URLs don't change (cool URIs don't change).