Since some time (maybe a year) I wanted to make a new website for myself. It really was nessecary because the design of the old page was not how I wanted to be represented in the web anymore and some friends began to nag about how bad the page looked. So I set out to design the page from scratch. I love sketch so naturally I did it in sketch.
Thankfully Sketch comes with some templates preinstalled. I used the one for website design. First I created a layout for the mobile view. I thought about what should be on the page. My name and a picture of me, current academic degree, short CV, info on how to reach me and some of the projects I did. Private and public ones alike.
I wanted my CV to somehow be a bulleted list. But with custom colored bullet characters. I didn't find a nice way so I used an svg inlined in css to make it work. (I still feel it to be some kind of a bad hack. But it works for me.) To make the svg as small as possible I minified it. Since there is no great tool available to minify svg url-compatible I used this. The explaination is quite an interesting read. In the end each bullet-point is smaller than 200 Bytes.
The week before creating the new page I've read online about making everything SSL(TLS) encrypted. I was already using Let's encrypt for some other pages. So it was an easy step for me to also use it for this new site. My config is a little strange. I had to make the verify folder for the domain new.spruce.de the folder of www because that's the default domain. (Try going to random.spruce.de you gonna get a cert and webpage for www.spruce.de)
Troy hunt recently wrote an article about making ones site really tightly closed. (link) I got an A+ on securityheaders.io
That was my little adventure to get a nice looking new web presence online. Start to finish in under two month. (It was laying there with a the design ready for over three weeks.)
Only thing I still want to do is improve the pagespeed. Minifying CSS and JS + some caching. I soon want to deploy all my pages with an ansible script and at the same time I will fix that (hopefully).
Tell me what you think about the improvement from my old page vs. my new page over at Twitter @skythedeath
Update (07.03.2018): I did it.