Site Redesign 2026
What did I do?
After deciding last year that this should be the centerpiece of my online presence, I realized the old website design was not great. So, I set out to improve it, make it a little prettier and more responsive, and made some big changes under the hood to better support future developments.
Redesign
The visible part is the redesign. I’ve revisited some of the layout and how things are presented, and (IMO, at least) it’s more consistent and better-looking overall. I also widened the maximum width a little bit, it was much too narrow before. It is also responsive on narrower displays1.
On a technical note, I aimed for properly semantic HTML with all styling achieved via CSS, and NO JavaScript. In theory, this thing will be usable on a web browser from the 1990s (it won’t be pretty, but it might be usable).
The bit I’m happiest about, perhaps, is the new image viewer/lightbox. A responsive, full screen lightbox which on desktop allows you to hover to pull up image info and on all platforms has discreet forward/back and close icons. All done in HTML5/CSS3 with NO scripting involved.
Content
I’ve not really changed anything regarding the content, not yet anyway. I’ll be adding a projects section but for now it’s the same galleries and articles sections as before.
Bye-bye Jekyll, hello Hugo!
The real changes are under the hood. I moved from the Jekyll static generator to Hugo. Hugo has more capability out of the box to produce a site like this one, whereas my Jekyll-based solution required some additional scripts and workarounds.
The galleries, for example, needed a script which I would have to run before building the Jekyll site, which generated source code files from which the galleries were built. But Hugo can generate the entire galleries structure, resize the images, and alert me to any issues, all from a set of gallery folders with just the exported images and a couple of templates.
It also allows the use of custom render hooks, which allowed me to get quite clever with how I put images into page content and where things like the captions, titles and alt text come from.
It’s just nicer to develop for, overall; at least for this site’s needs.
Anyway, enough techie nerd chatter. Go! Go explore! Have fun!
I was already doing that in the old site design, but it was not entirely well thought out. ↩︎