Year One

My first year as a website

Here we are, a year on. This is a huge amount of time in frontend web development. This time last year I was compiling-the-hell-out-of-everything with CoffeeScript and Stylus, dabbled with Angular (!?) and built this site with Jekyll.

Is Jekyll dead?

For me, yes. For everyone else, no idea. It felt good at the time: it was new, free, used cool shit like YAML front-matter and had good docs. But it quickly grew out of control - I contracted Jekyll-Bloat. I had so many folders for such a small site; it didn't seem logical. Jekyll is also blog-centric whereas the focus of this site is my portfolio - with a little bit of blog thrown in. For a blog-centric platform the writing experience was pretty unappealing and slow. It was also built on Ruby - a language I don't know and wouldn't otherwise use; this didn't make sense either.

(ES.) Next!

I wanted my site to be an expression of how I enjoy building every other site I work on: structured, crafted and progressive. I took Starting Blocks (the framework we use at work) and bolted a Markdown->JSON Gulp task to it - so now writing/publishing is super easy. The stack consists of ES2015 via Babel, Ractive and SASS. I'm also using ITCSS and InuitCSS to add serious structure to my CSS. Happy days!

I also felt the need to re-design my site. This fitted with the move to a much more structured approach to writing CSS but also allowed me to freshen things up. I'm using more imagery and some neat CSS animations/transitions to liven things up.

Worth it?

For me, yes. For everyone else, no idea. Let time and Google Analytics be my judge. In the past year I've had 3,769 user sessions (85% of which were first-time sessions) and 6,123 pageviews but an average session duration of just 49s. This means people are having a look but not sticking around. Rude bastards. Hopefully the fresh style and some more focussed posts will change this. See you next year!