What changed on my website and why?
2023.03.06.
As I do almost every year, I have changed a few things on my website for 2023. The reason is that I like new things, I like to improve things. After all, people change, develop and are influenced by things that make them want to be better and better. This year was no different. So at the end of the year I thought about a little update in the design and on the backend side. My previous site was based on a Tailwind based CSS framework. I designed the look of my site with OxyMade.
At the same time, I read and saw in many places that more and more sitebuilders are using Automatic CSS. It was flowing from everywhere. For that reason, and because I don’t like things that are hyped a lot or used too much, I didn’t get into it at the beginning. But this time I wanted something different, and this time it was the right decision. Why? Because Automatic CSS is simply brilliant. I come from a world where everything usually has to be pixel-perfect, but since it was my own site, I could afford to take the leeway and not rely on it this time. Instead, I took advantage of Automatic CSS to do a lot of the “dirty work” for me. But what does that mean?
Let’s start from the basics…
The previous page was composed of these main elements:
The main elements of the Stack (plugins)
- Oxygen Builder
- OxyMade
- Scripts Organizer
- Advanced Custom Fields
- CPT (Custom Post Types)
- Mautic (Form integration)
It was important that my site used as few plugins as possible, had as clean code as possible and was as fast as possible. With this in mind, I try to reduce any extensions I don’t need. So it was essential to get rid of the current 27 extensions and replace them with a solution that does the job without extensions. Why? Because almost everything can be solved with plugins, but I like a site to be as clear as possible, as native as possible, if I can put it that way. Of course, then I could have coded everything in. Why I didn’t, I’ll get to that in another article.
For the colours I used the colours of the PHP Storm IDE. I liked it. It’s contrasty and clean. I also left out the various complicated shapes for now. I’ve looked at countless competing sites and noted what elements I don’t like. I didn’t want to put text everywhere in the first place. More specifically, I saw competing sites as text on text. I understand it from an SEO point of view, but not from a customer experience point of view. Which is also an SEO factor. If there is too much information, the visitor will not browse through and navigate away. That’s why I wanted a clear and concise treatment for the site.
Of course, the content is constantly changing as I implement newer and newer additions, but I want to make them in a way that is easy to follow and consistent.
So I’ve changed a few things:
- Automatic CSS – CSS framework
- Meta Box – CPT and Custom Fields.
- Piotnet Forms (Contact and Newsletter Subscription via API)
- WP CodeBox – Custom Codes, Scripts, snippets.
These allowed me to throw out a lot of plugins from the previous setup. And I’m terribly happy about that.
I hope you will like it too.