First of all Merry Christmas in advance, you probably won't be hearing from me on Christmas Day.
Okay, so now that that's out of the way, let's talk about my website.
Yes...I rebuilt it...again.
What motivated you to redesign it
Good question. Well, it was time to renew my domain (siddharth.one), and yes, I had found a better domain. Using the old website just wasn't going to help, so I thought, fuck it, let's just rebuilt it.
Also with the release of Tailwind CSS 3, I really wanted to get my hands dirty with the updated version of the framework.
Okay, what really motivated you to design it
I really like the UI of the website. Also awesome color choices! But, in my opinion when it comes to personal websites you should put your skills and experience in focus. At least if your goal is the sell yourself to recruiters. I'm sorry but most recruiters won't care about blog posts. They care about what can you do and how long you've been doing it. A project portfolio is also important. Blog post do show a bit of your personality and interest for sure but a recruiter probably won't have time to read them. You might be the last application they're going through on a friday evening, the last thing you want to do is waste their time.
But other than that great work! And of course, this is just my opinion. 👆 The comment above. When scrolling through a particular old post, I came across this comment.
To be honest. I'm not looking for a job. And I won't need to for some time yet. But...
They care about what can you do and how long you've been doing it.
Wouldn't other people wanting to visit my site first like to first see, who I am, what I do, the skills I have, and the projects I have built. The answer is probably yes. Because why read someone's blog if you don't know if they are experienced in a certain topic.
Okay, enough talking. Show me the changes
1. The Domain
As I previously had mentioned, my old domain (siddharth.one), was going to renew, and I needed a better domain. Something shorter and possibly with a .com ending. So I decided to go for sidcrafts.com.
2. The design
To be completely fucking honest, the old website design wasn't too bad. In fact it was pretty good. But I sort of wasn't a fan of the layout the black background, or the orange/pink text. Another thing I learnt. Content is more important. So after changing the color scheme and some other stuff, I changed the layout to allow a ton more of content on the homepage.
A cleaner more simpler design:
3. The way the website is powered.
My old website was powered with Jekyll. I have to admit, pretty good, but painful update times. Also painful to code. My new website is built with HTML, Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js. No big bloated frameworks this time. Also, the blog page uses the Hashnode API to display the blog posts.
To be honest, quite a simple GraphQl query.
{
user(username: "sidcraftscode") {
publication {
posts(page: 0) {
title
brief
slug
}
}
}
}
I learnt how to do this from this blog post
Okay, we'll that's all then, I hope.
Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas