The Website I Kept Putting Off
After years of building websites for other people, I finally rebuilt my own with Astro.
That sentence probably makes perfect sense if you work in any kind of service profession. You spend your days taking care of clients, customers, patients, projects, equipment, schedules, or whatever else is needing attention that week. Then you look up and realize the thing you meant to take care of for yourself has been sitting on the back burner for a very long time.
For me, that thing was my website. I build websites all day. I help companies figure out what they need, make it clear, and get it online. But when it came to my own site, I kept finding something else that needed attention first. The cobbler’s children may go barefoot, but apparently the web developer’s website goes years without a proper rebuild.
Why I Went Static
When I finally decided it was time, I knew I wanted a static site. A static site is built ahead of time and served as ready made pages instead of assembling every page from a database every time someone visits. The result is a site that is fast, dependable, and easier to keep secure.
I also wanted to step away from the maintenance and security burdens that comes with other platforms such as WordPress or Joomla. Those platforms can still be useful in the right situation, but they also bring plugins, dashboards, updates, and another class of security concerns to keep track of. I did not want that hassle for my own site, and I have generally stopped building that way for clients too. If I can give a business a fast website with fewer moving parts to worry about, that is usually the direction I want to take. There are so many other things to worry about, why add one more, right?
A Brief Detour Through Eleventy
My first attempt at this rebuild was a site I built from scratch with Eleventy. I finished it, launched it, and felt pretty good about the whole thing. Then, the very next day, 11ty announced that it was joining Font Awesome. That was not necessarily bad news, but it made me wonder how much the direction of the platform might change. After putting that much time into a new foundation, I did not love the feeling of having to second guess it immediately.
Finding My Way to Astro and Cloudflare
So I moved again. This time I chose Astro, another static site generator, and paired it with Cloudflare. I have liked Cloudflare for a long time. I use and recommend many of its services, and I like having a platform that can handle the practical details around performance, security, and delivery without making me wrestle with a pile of unrelated tools.
After a few weeks of rebuilding, rearranging, deleting things I had just built, and rebuilding them again because apparently that is how web design works, I got the site to a place I really like. It now gives me a place to talk about my website services, as well as my newer managed IT services.
The First Version Is Live
This is the first version of the new site, and I absolutely love it. It is noticeably faster than my older WordPress sites, it is easier for me to manage, and it better reflects the kind of work I want to do going forward.
I will keep improving it as I go. That is part of the fun. But for now, the site is live, the pages are loading, and the web developer’s website has finally put some shoes on. Now let’s build yours!