Website Redesign 2024

New year, new design for my website. It’s a nice little tradition to overhaul your site every once in a while and for me, that’s roughly once a year. I take this as an opportunity to explore current (or past) design trends, and technological changes and question my profile in general.

This year, my focus was on improving the story I tell about myself and what kind of services I offer. I wanted to trim down on texts while at the same time being more precise and clear. Besides that, I wanted to further simplify the design.

Under The Hood

The website is still powered by Kirby, a simple file-based CMS. I’m not a front-end developer, but familiar with HTML and CSS, which is enough to build a simple website with Kirby. It works well and provides everything I need.

Another thing that did not change is my love for Utopia. It makes it incredibly easy to scale type and space without using breakpoints.

What’s new is the use of Plausible for simple, privacy-friendly analytics. I want to make better-informed decisions in the future about my website (it is an important part of my business, after all), so I needed analytics.But I hate cookie banners and the like, so I wanted to have something that works without all of that stuff.

A Minimal Design

The new site uses a single-column design on every page. This simplifies the codebase and also makes it easier to optimize images and other media. Furthermore, I removed some visual clutter to put more emphasis on the content.

I also got rid of the switch element that lets users change between light and dark mode. The site now automatically shows in a light or dark theme depending on the user’s OS setting. I don’t have any numbers on this, but I personally never manually change a website’s theme unless it is contrary to my OS setting.

Thoughts For The Future

The problem with (re)designing a personal site is that you could work on it forever. There is always a new idea, another thing to try, and an even better design iteration in your head.

Besides looking at the newly implemented analytics and getting some insights from that, I want to explore minimal, yet personal designs. It’s challenging to make something that’s very simple and minimal while having a personal touch at the same time.

But that’s something for next year.