A New Look and Feel for the Website

February 24, 2023
by Alan Vitek

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It’s been 3 years since I slapped together the last design for my website.

I remember thinking “Ah! I just need something basic and flexible and then I’ll work on making it better later.”

And of course, the bandaid ends up being the final design.

The new design is loosely based on some stuff I’ve seen trending on design pages recently and also is inspired from some of the more modular style Flash websites that were so popular around the early 2000s. I’m still debating on doing some kind of splash screen 😅 remember those? Maybe even include some background music! BEGONE WEB STANDARDS!

In all seriousness, this was also an opportunity to build something from scratch using flexbox, which I know is like OLD now, but coming from a place where my day to day is mostly using preexisting frameworks, I haven’t really had to learn the in and outs of it (kudus to CSS Tricks for their awesome walkthrough). There’s no frameworks here, just a couple hundred lines of CSS and the blankslate WordPress theme that includes all the basic PHP functions for a quick start.

I digging the direction so far. It’s a good base and I’d like to dig into animations a little bit more too. Probably nothing too too fancy. Just some good, subtle transition kind of stuff.

Overall, I miss the personality of the web from 20 years ago. (Ouch.) The web has evolved in really great ways, but design has kind of homogenized across the board for better or worse. Design standards can be practical though, and web tech has certainly made development… better?



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