My First Real Post

by Andy T

Reading time: 2 min

So I’m getting back into designing websites for fun. I started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript several years ago through freecodeCamp and I really enjoyed it, but somehow got out of practice a few years ago.

When I had a need to build a few websites several years ago, instead of putting the web design principles that I had already learned, I decided to use WordPress. I built quite a few sites using WordPress and some themes, but I always felt that it was kinda cheating - not really web design. I still maintained an interest in programming, but was mostly focused on learning and using Python. I plan to write some future blog posts about Python as I really enjoy writing Python scripts.

Recently I’ve been learning more about static site generators and think I’ve found what I was looking for all those years ago. I love the idea of SSGs and have been playing around with quite a lot of them, including Gatsby, Jekyll, 11ty, Middleman, and Hugo (which I’m using to build this site).

Of the SSGs that I’ve been playing around with, I feel that Hugo is the most straight-forward and fun to use. I’m a bit of a beginner when it comes to GoLang, but I really like the idea of it, and it seems to make most sense to me. I will look further into 11ty and Gatsby for future projects as I really enjoyed playing around with both of them.

I produce content for several blogs that I run, as well as this one. My wife is also a contributor to several sites too. She’s not really a technical person, so I’ve also been playing around with a few headless CMS, so that we both can create content on the go, from anywhere. I think I’ve found the one I like now called Sanity.

I’ll post a review of Sanity in a future blog, along with some of the other tools I’ve been playing around with, such as Netlify, Netlify CMS, Zeit Now, and the other SSGs that I posted about earlier.

Learning to do front-end web design has been a goal of mine for quite some time and I’m really happy to be working towards it now.

Stay cool everyone - until next time.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov