The source code for this website is available on GitHub.
Although I've spent time working with components of web development in the past, this website represents my first attempt at bringing something into production myself. My goal was to put together a simple website where I can discuss my University course and yap about tech, I didn't want to put anything fancy in just yet.
I've actually wanted to start my own blog for a while, and I even consider blogging for my university as well. The reason I started so much later, was because of my course's workload: I didn't have time to start up a website, and line up a bunch of posts to release on a schedule. However, now having a summer full of free time, I sat down and wrote this website, and will start blogging on a semi-regular basis.
Zola is a popular Static Site Generator (SSG). The University of Warwick Computing Society (UWCS) uses a modified version for its website, and to me, it presents as the simplest option for static site generation. By far my favourite feature is being able to write posts like this one in Markdown, as I've already had plenty of experience using it, and writing content is much faster this way than doing everything in plain HTML. It also supports Sass, which is a huge plus for someone like me, who finds working with CSS to be somewhat frustrating.
Zola is very quick to learn, you can get through the tutorial in about 20 minutes, and have a good-looking website up and running within a few days! Give it a try here.
As of writing, front-end development is not a strong suit of mine: creating responsive layouts to accommodate a range of devices is still pretty new to me, so the development of this website saw me battle a little bit with CSS, or rather, Sass. Fortunately, Sass's ability to import other files and nest selectors makes it far less of a headache to produce good-looking layouts.
I did contemplate using one of the many pre-existing themes that Zola offers, but this requires one to get to know the structure of said theme, in order to make modifications. Besides, using a theme did feel like cheating, and removes some creative control over the site's look and feel.
I wasn't particularly interested in having interactive elements on this website, so naturally this means there's not much use for having custom javascript on this website, which in my opinion would complicate things. That being said, I may implement animations and search later on, which will require the use of javascript. For any other stuff, I will likely end up creating a separate website/subdomain.
There's no doubt that some part of the layout and design can be reworked as this website evolves, and more content gets added. Creating this website was a huge learning experience for me, and it's certain I will come up with changes as I go along. I'm open to helpful suggestions for improvements if you have any!