Bulletin

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

I remade the entire site using 11ty, and now my code is super concise and easy to modify. I also started making some adjustments to my CSS to make it cleaner and, once again, easier to modify- the more improvements I make to my code, the more fun I find myself having building my website!

    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 (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.