I wanted to share my philosophy of building this site. I’m sticking with the something simple and fast that I am familiar with. For me, that’s a WordPress site. I already have web hosting set up, and have set up more WordPress sites that I can remember. WordPress is clean and fast by default, which I love.
I also love customizing a website, but it always ends up being a fussy matter. There seems to be a tradeoff in customizability vs. simplicity. Part of that I understand is natural, but it’s also frustrating. I want to be able to customize a website theme in ways that are important to me, but it seems like there is no solid middle ground of decent customizability out of the box. Theme builders either make themes very simple, or go overboard with customization options and features.
The extra options and features makes it a chore to wade through all the options and figure out what you need. It always seems to lead to bloat as well. Sometimes when you activate a single feature or plugin, your performance just gets killed.
If I had the time and the will to do it, I could build a theme from scratch, but that’s a very significant effort. I do appreciate when theme makers provide well-designed, sensible defaults, and you can get going without too much work.
At the time of writing this, I’m enjoying the default Twenty Twenty theme quite a lot. It’s fast and looks nice out of the box. There’s not a lot of customization options, so I’ll have to decide if I need to change themes down the road.
This site will be an open redesign. Apologies if you are visiting at a time when things could be broken. In a later post, I’ll provide more details on my setup. For now, I will just say that things are very simple, and we’ll see where things go from here.
