For the longest time I’ve had this pretty terrible company website that has been grating on my nerves. It was your typically horrible WordPress template kinda thing, albeit with a fair bit of orange involved for extra horror.
Back in the day is was really quite swish…
But cover your eyes, people…
Let’s get static: From WordPress to Hexo
I spent the day yesterday going hard at converting it over to a static Hexo setup, with a modern template, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.
Not only is it now properly responsive, with mobile-friendly menus, I’ve taken the opportunity to learn exactly how you can use Hexo to develop your own reusable static site templates.
For the UI design, I purchased one of the official bootstrap themes, then did the heavy lifting of splitting it into a re-usabled Hexo template. The whole “find a nice template and make it your own” is really my ideal way to work.
$99 later, and I’m cut over.
I’ve found working in Markdown, backed by Git push for deploy, all hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet, is just an ideal workflow for me. It really gets me focused on content, and stops me worrying about formatting until the very end of the day.
So much love for Canva
I’ve really fallen in love with Canva lately. For whipping up quick graphic elements, the templates they offer a just amazing - and ideal for the design challenged amongst us.
I need a “learning path” graphic, so I had a quick browse and there were dozen of timeline infographic templates in there! Giddy up!
Compressing things down
Canva produces some really crisp images, but they can sometimes be a little on the large side. To optimise web performance, I went with Riot which is perfect for my: “drag/drop file, visual compare, save” workflow.
Really helpful tool.
Phew!
That was a big day.
The website copywriting still needs plenty of work. But we’re definitely “Minimum Viable Website” for now.
And I’ve inspired myself to put a “blog rebrand” on the backlog too, so hopefully things will look more swish around here soon.
Time for clock off for the weekend!