I’d originally intended on publishing this post at the same time as my new website, which I recently rebuilt (and updated) for WordPress, but life happened and publishing the entire blog was delayed.
I’d wanted to rebuild my website since late last year, but it meant converting my original Bootstrap template and designing/building new matching pages for the blog, so I spent some time planning and visualising everything in my head before any of it materialised. I was completely aware of the benefits–namely, taking advantage of plugins, optimising performance, and giving my website more personality using dynamic content–so, it just made sense to invest the time. The project was also delayed several times when my family and mates visited from Australia, when I got my new longboard, when I became addicted to The Office, and then when I was looking for a new job and apartment. Nothing worth having comes easy, right?
Essentially, I built a WordPress theme from scratch, designed a new blog, and learnt a whole lot in the process, which feels great! My sense of detail and need to know how everything works also extended the amount of time involved a little, but I’m incapable of settling when it comes to my work. I went through various revisions and also made some updates to the home page to freshen the design up and maintain consistency.
These are the main areas I focused on:- User experience
- Mobile responsiveness
- HTML5 semantics
- Cross-browser compatibility
- Content manageability
- Performance, including:
- HTML/CSS/JS minification
- gzip compression
- Image compression
- Replacing all PNG logos with inline SVGs
- Browser caching
I’m sure that’ll be gibberish to a lot of people, but my objective for this blog is to flex my writing muscles and provide a home for my opinions on web technologies, tools, and trends, technology in general, how-tos, and maybe even some music every now and then. I’ve already drafted a few posts on topics that I’ve been wanting to dissect and pen in detail, so I’m looking forward to getting them up!