Reworking my website for the sixth time

At this point, it’s pretty much a yearly habit for me to redesign my website—usually without ever finishing it. My Figma project just keeps getting bigger, and the pile of old or abandoned designs grows with it. But sometimes—like now—I actually go ahead and build what I designed.

And for the first time, I also decided to add a blog to my website. So here we are: this is my first post, where I want to talk a bit about the motivation and the process behind creating this version of the site.

Motivation

As I already said, redesigning my website is something I do quite often, but most of the time I never finish the design or the implementation. The last time I updated my site was in December 2023—so almost two years ago—and it looked like this:

But something about it didn’t feel right anymore. A lot of the content felt like it’s just there to fill up space, and I wasn’t really happy with the design choices anymore either. So I started playing around with a new layout. Before landing on the current version, I actually began another redesign about a year ago, which looks like this:

I never finished that one because, at some point, I realized it didn’t really work as a portfolio. Also, it still had the same issue: most of the content existed just to fill empty gaps. So when I started designing what eventually became the new version, I aimed for something much simpler—and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Technical Aspect

Like my previous websites, this one is built with SvelteKit. The new part, however, is that, for the first time, I’m using a CMS to manage the content on my website. A content management system (CMS) is software that lets you manage your content—such as posts or project entries—easily. Many CMS platforms also include a page builder you can use to design and build the frontend.

There are also “headless CMS” systems, which don’t include a page builder. Instead, they just provide an interface for managing content and an API for retrieving it. For this site, I’m using the free and open-source headless CMS Strapi, as I wanted to built the frontend of my page on my own.

Outlook

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be posting here regularly. I might share some notes or short guides whenever I have something worth writing about, but no promises. Maybe this post will end up being the only one, or maybe I’ll even write about things that aren’t tech-related at all. We’ll see.