I threw away yesterday's site

Where I started

So I threw it away and rebuilt the whole site in another style: brutalist, elegant, clean. Nothing about electronics is left.

The first attempt looked like a kid's magazine: stickers, crooked shapes, colours turned up too high.

I scrapped that too.

The new rule fits in one line: only rectangles and straight lines, one accent colour, one big element per screen.

So what? A sticker or a crooked box no longer needs a discussion. It breaks the rule, so it goes.

Three of everything

I compared three versions:

• concrete grey with a red accent;
• paper-coloured with blue;
• almost black.

I took the fonts from the first and the dark base from the third, and kept the orange.

The hero got the same treatment, with three ideas: a brutalist tower drawn in code, a water polo pool seen from above, and a bust. I chose the tower.

It moves a few pixels with the mouse and its windows light up, but no project names sit on it. So what? The tower is a picture, not a menu.

The opening is an orange line and bands that pull back in steps. It takes about two seconds, and one click skips it.

I also tried several animations for scrolling and for text. On the About page I chose the one where statements appear word by word.

One rule, three versions of everything, one choice each time.

What I rebuilt

• Every page: home, About, Projects, project pages and articles.
• The same header, footer and Available bar everywhere.
• Projects in a new order: the ones already started come first.
• Keywords in articles, now in orange.
• My LinkedIn, on the About page.

On a phone the header now has a dropdown, because stacked vertically it took up too much space.

I worked in four phases on a separate branch, with a safety tag to go back to. So what? If the new site had gone wrong, the old one was one command away.

What broke

During the cleanup, a folder move failed. The sync script, the one that copies header and footer into the pages, then rewrote those parts in six trial pages.

Move fails → script runs anyway → six pages changed. It showed up in the report, and I restored them.

The final check found a real defect. On small phones, at 320 pixels, my name ran off the screen while the font was loading.

On a site whose whole point is my name, that one had to go. I added a fallback font, and now the name stays inside.

What I learned

A whole new look doesn't have to mean new addresses. The 24 pages from before are the same 24 now. So what? No link to the old site breaks.

Then I published, and asked Google how to get those links under my search result. They're automatic, you can't order them, and they depend on a clear structure and clear titles.

So what? There's no setting to look for. The clear structure is the part I can do.

Yesterday, a lab bench. Today, rectangles and straight lines. Same addresses.