THIS WEBSITE

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Why make this basic web 1.0 website in the 2020s? After all, if I wanted a functional, good looking, professional website, there’s plenty of fancier and more standard ways to do it. The simplicity is intentional, and to understand that design intent, read further.

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Design Goals

Any project needs some goals, even if they’re only implicit. After all, if you don’t have a reason to build something… why build it? For me, the goals were:

• Personal:
  • Have a working website that people who are curious by the domain in my email can find
  • Link to other publicly available information about myself
  • Act as a blog if there are concepts I want to publish, since I don’t do that on social media platforms and this is more permanent
  • Have a home page for colleagues, friends, and acquantances to get to know me deeper, start conversations, and/or stay in touch
• Professional:
  • Link to sites related to my professional skills
  • Serve as a portfolio for my personal projects
  • Host my resume
• Technical:
  • Refresh myself on basic web development concepts (HTML, CSS)
  • Avoid complexity and work within the constraints of the basic web standards (no Javascript, etc.)
  • Learn the use of Jekyll by deploying something operationally from scratch
  • Learn how many static sites are deployed by using a serverless service like Cloudflare Pages
• Design:
  • Iterate on palette, logo, and font variations to make a “style” that fits me
  • Establish clear branding that I can keep consistent across various platforms

Equally important are the things that weren’t my goals with this project:

• Personal:
  • Gain a social media following
  • Only show professional-oriented information
    • (I’m not a robot! Showing vulnerability and hobbies is important to being a well-rounded person!)
• Professional:
  • Act as a web design portfolio
    • (That’s not what I do professionally!)
  • Showcase deep technical knowledge on web development or hosting
    • (This won’t be an innovative, genre-defining website)
• Technical:
  • Make a flashy, responsive website that uses cool javascript interactive elements
  • Have authentication for content management beyond static text files
• Design:
  • Act as an art design portfolio
    • (This is a personal project and is designed around my tastes - I don’t care what anyone else thinks)

Inspiration

These are the creative works that inspired and influenced me in this project:

• xboxahoy.com
  • Ahoy’s impeccable style extends through his website
    • It’s dead simple, not having any unnecessary complexity
    • It’s highly functional, presenting only the necessary information
    • It’s focused, and doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t
  • Yes, this is where I got the idea for my email address. After all, Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
• boringcactus.com
  • Melody’s website is also an exercise in focused, no-frills design
    • It’s stylized without trying too hard to be
    • It’s a website with an authentic voice
  • The blog posts are wonderful and are inspiring for the type of diatribes on things that I have strong opinions about and feel are worth sharing
    • Seeing these showed me the value of a 2000s blog in a 2020s world; much like a written, physical letter showing more intention and thoughtfulness than a text, a blog post that you write in markdown and publish infrequently has enough of a barrier to entry compared to social media slop to make sure that you have something worth saying
• motherfuckingwebsite.com
  • A bold statement on the excesses of modern web design, this website humorously roasts the trend of flashy websites that waste a lot of time and effort delivering little value
  • It harkens back to the days when HTML was literally about hypertext as a concept for information exchange, not a filetype that’s used to render commercial slop or prove anything
  • It’s a humbling reminder against overdesign

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Implementation

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November 2025 - December 2025

Implementation seriously began in November 2025, when I decided on my hosting setup, Cloudflare Pages. Basically, I didn’t want to use Github Pages because of both contrarianism and because I want to focus first on learning the fundamental architecture, not a “service”’s implementation of Jekyll as a service. After I understood Jekyll on base principles, I was chill with hosting it through Cloudflare, especially because the domain is already hosted on there.

Once my deployment setup was functional, the more satisfying work of incremental tweaking of content and styling began. I used Jekyll’s ability to iterate over yaml data to create the systems for making rapid changes to the link index and project list. Getting the resume to embed as an object at the correct size was something that I deemed “good enough” even if I’m not 100% confident in how it scales on different displays.

After I had some basic content to test beyond a blank page, I could begin formatting it and deciding how best to present the information. This became a feedback loop where I could develop more of my writing style the more that I knew how it would format, with things such as the boxes to hold content, horizontal rules, and image formatting.

Being satisfied enough with my CSS, the final step was adding the first pass of content, which includes this post detailing the project. I made the decision to not wait to document every single project I’ve worked on before releasing the site to the public. For me, one project breakdown and one blog post were enough to prove every aspect of the website as functional.

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Changelog

• 2025-12-17: Published website and this project page on designing the website