revamping an old website

In my junior year of high school, I gained an interest in web development. I created a small starter website and then decided to challenge myself by making a larger, more complex one dedicated to showcasing my CS career.

Goals

The main question I started with was: What did I ultimately want from this website? This led me to define my goals:

• I wanted a go to place to direct people to. My resume/linkedin/github/older website alone each had different parts of my life, and I wanted to create something where people could see the entire picture.
• I wanted a distraction-free environment to share my thoughts. I'm not particularly fond of social media as it is full of advertising, addictive features, and social pressure/stigma. Here was a small section on the internet to express myself.
• I wanted to improve my design skills. I wanted it to look cleaner and minimal, and have a more put-together color pallete than the original. I planned to put more thought into the overall design and look of the site.

Why from scratch?

While there are a lot of tools that will generate your website for you, I wanted the creative freedom of designing something myself. This project is one in which I wanted to learn as much as possible about web development and I felt the best way to learn the most was to simply do it myself.

Next steps

Now that I have a finished website, it's time to consider the next steps. Originally, I planned to add more things like smooth animations and cooler effects when my friend told me "Perfection is not when you have nothing else to add, but nothing else to take away." It was useful advice since I found myself wanting to add more and more to the website. I have finally decided to be satisfied with the aesthetics, at least for the next couple of months. For now, the main goals are to add to the thoughts and projects page over time and fulfill the purpose of the site. Oh, and it still looks a little odd on mobile as well, so that is also a to-do.