Rebuilding responsively
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I've recently rebuilt a friend's website for her. It's a site I originally built back in 2010, based on the Joomla content management system, which had been recommended by another friend some years earlier. The website worked and did what it needed to, but I never loved it, in part because I wasn't enamoured with Joomla. As well as some usability quirks, I found that it was extremely vulnerable to opportunistic hackers. Having lost count of the number of times I'd had to go in and repair it, I finally bit the bullet and decided to replace it. Triggered in part by this, I thought it was about time I revisited my own website too.
I had two main goals when it came to looking at my website. The first was to review whether, like my friend's website, the technology it was based on was still good enough. The second was to bring the design up to date.
The first goal was the one that gave me the most pause. My website has used WordPress for as long as it has existed. WordPress is one of the most popular and preeminent blogging tools around, and it's always served me pretty well. I run a blog, and that's what WordPress is designed for. The only trouble I ever had with it is that, like Joomla, its ubiquity makes it an easy target for hackers. While it was rare that this affected me, I wasn't immune to it. At the very least, I went through a phase where I regularly got hit by a volley of spam comments on my posts. That none of them ever made it onto the front-end website was more down to my own cautious approach to its settings than any particular strength of the tool to stop them.
WordPress isn't a bad tool. I think it's overused for things it shouldn't be—whole commercial and brochure websites, for example—but as a blogging tool, it's one of the best out there. Even though moving away from it would be a lot of work, however, I was still inclined to make the jump. For one thing, I'm a .NET developer and WordPress is written in PHP—a very different development platform, and one that makes it more complicated for me to extend. I know PHP, but I prefer .NET as you can do more with it. I'm aware of how customisable WordPress is, but it would take me longer to do. I also wanted the opportunity to experiment with, and learn about, some .NET technologies I haven't used before—something my day job has been sadly lacking of late.
The other goal was to revisit the design. I didn't dislike what it was before, but I felt it could use a tidy up, not least to make it more accessible on smaller devices. Last time I redesigned the website, smartphones were only just starting to take off and responsive websites hadn't yet become the norm. Now, mobile users account for more website visits globally than desktop, so I wanted to make sure my website worked for everyone. One of my biggest strengths is HTML and CSS. I like hand-coding layouts that are responsive and flexible, so it made sense that I'd eventually do this on my own website too.
Responsive websites scale according to the size of the window they're being viewed in. You'll generally see a different layout on a phone screen than you would on a desktop computer, but it's exactly the same content. The best way to demonstrate this is if you view my site on a desktop computer and manually resize the browser window. You should see the layout change to fit the window and switch between single and multiple columns. It didn't do that before, which made it hard to read on smaller devices. Well... better late than never.
Both websites are now more or less ready. My friend's site isn't live yet, but it will be as soon as she's finished sorting out the content. Both will likely see a few tweaks here and there as we get used to them, or want to add more features—no website is ever truly finished—but I'm happy to call them done for now.
So, does that mean you'll see more stuff on my website in future? Umm... well... I don't know. One of the reasons it's taken me this long to do anything with it is that I've been focusing on other projects—not least work (which, as a web developer, makes me less inclined to spend my free time building websites too), and my (non-blog) writing. These things remain my main focus. As such, I wouldn't expect a sudden increase in the amount of blogs I post. I'd love to post more, but I still struggle to come up with ideas for topics. As and when something comes to mind, however, I will try. Having a new site has made me more inclined to produce content. I just need to come up with something to write about. As always, suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, I hope you like the new website.