Redesign notes: #1

One of my goals for next year is to write and publish more often (as it has been for the past few years and I’ve horrifically failed at). But, as everyone knows, before you can start writing you have to redesign your website.

This week I’ve booked out a chunk of time to redesign and rebuild my site from the ground up. The hope is that a fresh new site will provide the perfect platform to start writing and publishing again in the new year.

Here are a few of my thoughts as I start the project:

• I’m sticking with WordPress and plan to fully embrace Gutenberg. I know there are lots of great platforms out there to choose from, but it makes sense to stick with what I know given that my business specialises in WordPress development.
• I want the site to load as fast as possible. It will be minimalist in style and I’ll only include what is absolutely necessary.
• I plan to use as little Javascript as possible and where I do, I’ll be using vanilla Javascript.
• I’m going to stick with Sass. While I’ve enjoyed writing vanilla CSS again lately, there’s still a few things that I find useful: mixins, imports, etc.

The tools I’ll be using to build the website look something like this:

• Visual Studio Code, my code editor of choice
• Laravel Valet for my local development environment
• Gulp for compiling Sass
• WordPress as the CMS, with just two plugins initially: ACF and WP Migrate DB Pro
• Fathom for privacy-friendly analytics
• GitHub as my code repository
• DeployHQ for code deployments
• My hosting setup will remain the same: Digital Ocean paired with Server Pilot

I’ll be “live designing” as I go, so the plan is to launch updates throughout the week. I’ll be sharing the process as I go.