Greetings!
Finally the updated site is up and running! Have you signed up for email updates already? If not yet, here is your chance…
One less thing… :-)
Originally I started on a quest to rebuild my personal website on a new platform, stepping away from a Wordpress-based implementation. I decided that I will rebuild the site based on Jekyll. To read more about my thought process, jump to my other post: How I roll.
If you are still with this post, then here is a short update of how the updated site compares to the previous version.
- Key functionality to support:
- Accomodate simple blog => Accomplished (Link to blog)
- Showcase photography portfolio => Accomplished (Link to Photography page)
- Manage content => NR: there was no specific goal here
Currently to push myself to get more familiar with Markdown language, I type the blog posts using markdown. When needed, I mix up HTML and markdown in a single document, add JS as necessary. Definitely a great way to get more comfortable with a broader range of tools. So far making progress… - Dynamic vs Static content => Accomplished
The content I am hosting, the structure of static pages is perfect. - Users => NR: there was no specific goal here
- How complicate to work with and/or learn => Accomplished As I mentioned above under point point 2, so far any technical skills needed, I was able to cover, no concern there. I also expect the more I advance with my studies at Turing, the less of a concern this will be.
- General page load => Accomplished See later in this post more details on this. Definitely significant improvement!!!
- Site design simplicity/complexity => Accomplished I am very happy with the latest theme that I pick up for this site. I ended up customizing it a tiny bit, but the general design what the theme already included is what you see throughout this site. How do you like it? Personally I like it a lot! Feel free to share links in the comment section below to other sites with similar simple designs.
As promised, here is some more detail about the general page load improvement. Main page load time was floating around 6 seconds with the old Wordpress-based implementation. With the current static page structure, the main page load time is less then one second most of the time.
I used a handful of sites to prepare reports about the pages. Besides the page load speed, Jekyll takes care of a lot of the document structure details which were missing or improperly set up with the Wordpress theme I used previously. That is definitely an added bonus here. Without posting all the screenshots from all the test sites, here is a pair from one of them. This shows very well the difference between the old and new design.
Old implementation test result:
New implementation test result:
Overall I am very happy with the results.
One detail I am still trying to get a better handle on is updating the content on the server side: The FTP client I have been using does not offer feature of syncing the updated content between my computer (local development environment) and the server (production environment). Fortunately there is not many files which are changes once Jekyll rebuilds the site, but long term having a file structure sync solution would be very helpful and necessary to save time. Any suggestions are more than welcome. :-)