Bulletin

Rework #4 complete as of May 2025. I know what you're thinking: everything looks the same, what rework?

I made the plunge into learning the next (scary) step of making websites that is static site generators, and remade my entire site using 11ty. Well, first I remade my portfolio site with 11ty so I could cancel my squarespace subscription, then I decided I liked it so much I'd do this site.

My HTML is way cleaner and easier to edit now, and I'm not using Javascript to inject HTML all over the place anymore. That was an attempt to reduce repetition when, in reality, there was so much more repetition in my code than I could have imagined. As a result, my site is functional (and still looks nice) with javascript completely disabled!

I'm really happy with the results, even if it's all just backend. My next step is probably cleaning up the CSS, which still has a lot of repetition and inefficiencies in it and is not very well organized. I also lost some functionality in my blog- it's running totally via 11ty now, and while a lot is possible in the framework, I haven't quite wrapped my brain around the more complex stuff yet. Once I figure that out more, I may be able to convert my YiS comic section all to my own code too!

I wish I'd been building with a static site generator sooner, but honestly, I think I needed to learn how to construct web pages from scratch before approaching this step. I can't imagine ever going back, though!

    To Make:

  • A pony art gallery
  • A fan page for Bishop 🐱, and maybe some other pages for my favourite things. They can be fun and messy, like collages
  • More useful things in the resources section- the sort of things that have helped me in my learning process
  • Some fun pop-up and/or draggable stuff (non-essential).

    To-Do:

  • Another once-over for site accessibility (including alt-text)
  • Update galleries with more and newer work
  • Make an RSS feed, if I can figure out what to put in it. Maybe think about blog posts more related to my art process.
Rework #3 Spiel (mostly here for posterity)

Rework number 3, woohoo!

So, I returned to my old site's code, and it was kind of overwhelming. o_o"

While there's a lot of things I'm going to re-use and re-purpose, I've been wanting to rework this site for a while. The old site is still something I'm proud of, and I was intentional in the sort of mish-mash of styles- it was a place for experimentation! But I think I want something a little more put-together now.

I still plan on experimenting, but I want the important sections of this site to be functional, easy to edit- keep it simple, silly! There's some bad CSS/HTML habits I slid into that I want to avoid repeating.

Finally, my long term goal was always to decommission my carrd and my squarespace and rely entirely on this site (eventually giving it the main sheyennesmith.com url), and that goal is still very real!

    Building with these goals/lessons:

  • It's never going to be perfect, but always design with accessability in mind. It makes everything easier in the long run anyway.
  • Use semantic HTML where possible. Additionally, keep HTML as clean and specific as possible and minimize unnecessary nesting and div soup.
  • Don't apply styles directly to semantic HTML elements (lesson learned)
  • Better separation of layout and appearance CSS
  • Minimize use of magic numbers and the !important property. Always understand why things are happening, no band-aid fixes.
  • Massively simplify how I design for responsivity. Minimize use of breakpoints/media queries.
  • Re-use as much as possible. Don't repeat yourself!
  • Design with modularity in mind. I want it to be as painless as possible to add/remove/combine pages and sections.
  • When you use Javascript, try to understand how it functions and edit it to your needs. Blindly copy-and-pasting creates a lot of bloat.
  • When frustrated, step away, sleep on it, and approach from a different angle.

One last thing to note: the site is unfortunately non-functional without JavaScript. This is due the neocities not supporting PHP. I'm thinking about migrating the website to somewhere that I have server-side access, now that I'm at a point where I'm starting to understand more about websites.

I'll probably wait until the site's in a state where I'm fully comfortable deactivating my squarespace site and giving this site the domain name.