site_development_001
If getting back into website development is like riding a bike, then apparently I only remember a unicycle.
It’s been a few years since I tried doing anything with web development from the ground up, and it shows. Professionally, I do Technical SEO for large companies. I can tell you about optimizing your page speed or technical foundations (don’t judge this site yet, I’m getting to it!).
I can, and have, written two thousand word documentation on how to optimize web-font delivery, or what the proper way to encode images is.
Last night I searched for “remove page title from WordPress site.”
It went downhill from there.
One of the hardest parts about getting started again is that I keep falling back into old patterns. The Gutenberg editor wasn’t a thing, Blocks/Full Site Development wasn’t a thing.
I also wasn’t doing technical SEO so I used so many plugins that I’ve since forgotten the name of. It might be better if I was starting from zero.
That is the point though, right?
I wanted to create a website for a few reasons:
- Right now, my entire professional presence is on LinkedIn. If you Google my name, the top results are LinkedIn, a Twitter I don’t use, and… MySpace? I wanted a place for me.
- I have interests related to, but not neatly encircled by, my job. I enjoy coding and coffee and budgets, three things that a lot of people in my field do, but it’s *not* technical SEO, so writing about it on a dedicated topical blog or on my linkedIn. I wanted somewhere I could.
- Working on massive platforms with development teams is amazing, but it also means I am a bit removed from the day to day. I wanted something I could mess around with.
- More important than it should be: Once I thought of this name and saw it was available, I had to get it.
Current Struggles
So what is the issue I’m currently struggling with? Well like getting back on a bike I have to remember how everything works.
You’ll notice this page has no styling. I am a big fan of minimalism, but this is even a bit much for me.
I’ve spent hours trying to figure out my homepage, and we can all see how that is going.
The Truth is I went into this saying I wanted to do everything Native, to only have plugins that did something super useful (like Cloudflare CDN) but I might break down and use Elementor unless I can figure out the responsiveness issue in blocks. If I do, the format of this page might change, but until then, you get to see how I format my personal notes, fancier even because I included a screenshot!
Learning that markdown syntax seems to work was a pleasant surprise.
So why bother writing? Why bother putting this rambling semi journal into public instead of keeping it locked in my Obsidian Vault? Because I think documenting the process will be nice too.
Big dreams, but maybe I need to humble those ambitions.
At least for now.