New Year, New Website!

I’ve been tinkering around for the last 9 months or so building this website and a companion professional portfolio FROM SCRATCH! I only rebuilt my website fairly recently using Squarespace, but I started to have niggles. I think Squarespace is an amazing service for people who don’t know a lot about web coding, or who just want something quick, simple and easy to maintain. But I grew dissatisfied with using it for my own site for the following reasons:

  1. If Squarespace went bust I’d lose my website. I don’t think they’re likely to, but I started feeling uncomfortable uploading stuff without being able to access the files directly or back up the whole site if I wanted to move elsewhere.
  2. I didn’t have the control I wanted over how things looked or how things worked.
  3. It gets expensive to pay for a Squarespace site each year! I thought there must be cheaper alternatives out there.

After exploring and experimenting with lots of different options I decided to build a site from scratch using a framework called Kirby. It’s not the easiest thing to get yer bonce abaaht as it requires a fair amount of knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP, but it’s been really fun to learn and DEEPLY SATISFYING to get things working as I desire! If you’re interested in learning HTML and CSS I’ve really enjoyed using Codecademy over the years, but there are a lot of great resources out there.

This version of my website hopes to address a few aims of mine:

  1. A fun and simple way to categorise, organise and display many types of creation. I can’t and don’t think I’ll ever stick to one type of creative output, so I wanted a place to keep it all safe and tidy, and easy to explore.
  2. Minimalist yet playful design. I’m sick of websites being so flashy and bloated and in your face, so many things on screen at once! I wanted this site to be fairly minimal, and try to find a way to make it easily navigable and enjoyable to use.
  3. Adaptability. I want the site to be able to grow and change as I do, so I can use information and content I’ve uploaded in different ways as I see fit.

Consider this a work in progress! There’s much more I’d like to add, and I’m really curious to learn about what it’s like to use for other people. If you have any feedback on how I could make the site better, or anything you’d like to see please email me or leave a comment below!

23rd January 2020

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Simon Panrucker playing a blue recorder