It’s been (almost exactly) five years since I launched the last version of this website. It’s served me well, but I’m happy to say that v5 is finally live. Hooray!
Simplicity
I wanted to reduce the noise and make things as simple as possible — minimal, nearly to the point of boring. I got rid of a lot of things I felt were unnecessary. I knew early on that I wanted to reduce navigation to just two links: portfolio, to serve as the landing page and show my work, and writing, for all my articles.
Accessibility
I made an effort to embrace accessibility, up to WCAG 2.0 AA requirements. Accessibility Developer Tools by Google Accessibility was a great help, though it does give some false warnings, such as this issue that I came across. I still recommend it, though. Also, ChromeVox is a free screen reader that was easy to test with.
The accessibility guideline I had the hardest time with was color contrast. Not that it was hard to do, but it meant sacrificing softer colors and lighter shades of gray that I wanted to use for text. Speaking of color, I used Open Color to assemble my color palette.
Technology
Article pages are powered by WordPress, using my own theme and some custom functions. Everything else is running on .NET MVC 5. I updated some of my open source .NET projects to use here, namely SuperFeed and ImageFix.
I also moved the site to a new host, which is hopefully a good thing. I started using Uptime Robot to ping my site every five minutes, which hopefully has the side effect of keeping my site spun up (shared hosts have a bad habit of spinning down .NET apps that have a lull in requests).
Moving On
I spent way too much time on this. I guess that tends to happen with side projects with no deadlines. But now I can move on and get back to writing.