Adventures in Web Design

Sat Apr 15 2023 05:23:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Why does this site even exist?

This website started off as an experiment. I wanted to continue messing around with Web Design after many projects that I have worked on in School or University. I finally took it seriously as I was working on a website for a University event in 2021. Which sent me down the rabbit hole!
I threw that website together fairly quickly. Using bootstrap and for most if not all of the layout for the page. It used alot of the basic layout tools & components from bootstrap. It also used modals for some of the content on the site. It was hosted on Amazon S3 static website hosting, as it proved to be very easy and very cost effective.

But of course, I was being really lazy and I didn't want to code websites completely by hand anymore. So, I started to mess around with other tools. I experimented with CMS tools hosted in Amazon such as Joomla, Drupal, Ghost, ModX and even WordPress as they had templating and other similar systems. But I eventually fell back onto S3 Static and doing everything by hand again, as those tools simply cost too much to run and too much time to maintain.

I want to be lazy!

Developing a whole website by hand, while possible, is very stupid. So most, if not all of my time was spent on a single page.

This page conisted mainly of a single animated image and some basic text, with the beginnings of some navigation.
Later on I added in a contact us form, which would send the message from the user to a Lambda Function and to myself in a Discord channel.

What next?

I couldn't decide what content to put on the site, nor could I work out even how I wanted to add the content either...
Eventually I began work on another project. That Party Game was a difficult project and made me abandon alot of my existing bad habits, like my addiction to bootstrap which up until I used exclusively for layouts.

After this project I went back and redesigned everything, using alot of the techniques from That Party Game to enhance the design and also the structure of the site.
This resulted in a much more neutral design, along side the use of css variables and Javascript!

From there I found a templating engine called eleventy. Check out my page on eleventy here or checkout the website here!