New website content is coming along. I’ll be updating this post as I go to list changes, as well as where my priorities are. As it stands, I’m largely making this up as I go and haven’t gone in with any sort of prototype, so there might be some back and forth on design and some pages will be broken for a bit.
Priorities
- Fast (Performance)
Looking to massively improve site performance with a lighter design and better server setup (more considered caching and optimisations). Pretty much there already but will strive to not let that slide. Ohh, and I’ve moved the site to a much faster VPS instance. All in all the previous homepage was very graphic heavy and slow to load, and I’m looking to get away from that. - Good page benchmark in general
Along with the actual speed, I’m looking to ensure accessibility and other factors that Google Page Insights or GTmetrix might measure. - Responsive design
I’ll be giving attention to mobile that I didn’t previously. - Blogging content back to the front
With the previous redesign I removed emphasis on the blog component of the site. Thing is, I never could think of much static content to include. I’m bringing the blog content back. - Non ‘article’ blog post
Following the previous point, I’d like to post more but I’ll hopefully look to have support for a few post types that aren’t full articles. Something I can churn out quickly. Not sure how these will look, and it may just be a templated blog post with stock images. We’ll see how that plays out.
Changes
- Brand new header, which is responsive and scales to mobile
- Retired old homepage and brought blog to front
- New blog template
- Removed contact page (I’d never have answered these anyway!)
- New caching. Now using FastCGI via NGINX and Hummingbird Pro (possibly don’t need both, but we’ll see).
- Cleaned up image optimisation, fixed some lazy loading etc
- New Single Post page
- Fixed spacing under bullet list
To Do
- Improve mobile performance
- Disable unnecessary Javascript (Including theme elements)
- Review column use of flex