The New JamesGolebie.com

Posted on September 1st, 2023.

In 2017 I purchased jamesgolebie.com and launched my personal website for the first time. I was coming out of school and wanted to have a site to showcase my experience and help market myself for full time roles. I didn't have much coding experience at the time, and wanted to get my site live quickly, so I ended up building the site using Wix. Wix is great. They have tons of well designed templates, an easy to use editor, and plenty of advanced functionality. To keep it up to date I would make updates to my site as I took on new positions and developed in my career. Aside from one design refresh, the site stayed essentially the same and had "lived" on Wix for the past 6 years. You can check out an archived version of my original site here. Pretty nice, right?

So why'd I throw it all out and start over?

First, the site never really felt like mine. Sure, it had pictures of me and it displayed all of my content, but it didn't feel like my own unique thing. This was bound to happen as a result of using a design template on a WYSIWIG editing platform like Wix. Here's the template my site was based on. Even though I personalized it in various ways over the years it still has the same feel as my site. Coming from a background in graphic design I take a lot of pride in designing things myself. I’m wary of templates and stock designs in every domain because I enjoy the process of creating things from scratch.

Second, I like simple sites. Though the Wix template looked nice and had smooth animations, it was unnecessarily slow. It (and so many websites out there today) are over-designed and try to be fancy at the cost of a worse user experience. As motherfuckingwebsite.com so eloquently states:

This entire page weighs less than the gradient-meshed facebook logo on your fucking Wordpress site. Did you seriously load 100kb of jQuery UI just so you could animate the fucking background color of a div? You loaded all 7 fontfaces of a shitty webfont just so you could say "Hi." at 100px height at the beginning of your site? You piece of shit.

No need to overcomplicate things when a simple static HTML site will accomplish the job! I admittedly also have some nostalgia for the earlier days of the internet. Back before every site was corporate-ified and SEO'd out the wazoo, when you'd find yourself on sites that felt like they were made by an actual human being. Parimal Satyal captures this sentiment better than I ever could in his post Rediscovering the Small Web, which partially inspired my redesign.

Finally, building my site from scratch with my limited knowledge of HTML and CSS would be a fun challenge and learning experience. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I received an email from Wix earlier this year alerting me to an upcoming price increase.

They would be increasing the annual cost by 45%! I had to be realistic. My little site averaged roughly 50 pageviews a year. At the new price of over $200/yr I would be essentially paying $4 per view to host the site. It was clear that Wix's offerings were overkill for my needs. Ultimately, creating a new site that I can be proud of, while expanding my technical skills, and reducing my hosting costs would be a win-win-win!

So, what's my new low-cost tech stack?

$2.99/month for Hostinger, and that's pretty much it. I drop my static files in Hostinger's file manager and I'm good to go. I can also host up to 100 websites on my current plan, which makes it easy to spin up side projects if need be. I'm sure there are limitations to this setup that could cause issues if I wanted to increase the complexity of my site or if I were to start receiving an increase in traffic for some reason, but given my current goals and expectations it seems perfect.

I'm writing everything in VSCode and testing locally before pushing the updated files to Hostinger. I clicked through this entire list of personal websites to see what others have done and come up with a plan for my own site. I wanted to keep the site as simple as possible so that I would be able to build it out over time without getting in over my head too quickly. I'm quite happy with how it has turned out!

Here's a brief rundown of my goals and plans for the site moving forward. With the main build out complete I plan to add more projects, resources, and posts to the site as time goes on. I have been trying to write more and get better at clearly articulating my thoughts. I hope that by having a place to post essays/blogs I will make the effort to do so. Above all else, I'm just having fun with it. It makes me happy to see my little site out there on the world wide web.