Old Portfolio Website

Introduction

This is a basic portfolio website made for fun and experimenting. It’s my first website that I built from scratch and publishing to the web so please give me any feedback that you have.

I’m also slowly rebuilding the website - https://gnoxnahte.dev. The main reasons are because since this is my first serious websites, some code isn’t easily maintainable to add new features and fix bugs. I also don’t really the bland colors and would like to change the styles. Hoping to separate “web dev” and “game dev” too.

Why I chose to build a website from scratch

• Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript / TypeScript
• More flexibility and control
• Search functionality, making it easier for potential clients / employers to find projects related to the work they are doing
• Better performance (Especially when compared to website builders)
• My previous website for reference (Using Wix)

Why I chose Astro

• Easy to start, for a beginner in web development
• Has great markdown features, making it easy to create new project pages and update the site. Like a blog
• Fast and responsive with its islands architecture and server-side rendering
• Pre-renders most of the JavaScript on the server, making it easy to build and fast when clients view it.
• Free
• Open source
• Active community
• Frequent updates
• If you want to read more about it: Astro Docs: Why Astro

Things to improve

• UI & UX
  • I’m mainly a programmer with very less knowledge on website UI design.
  • Please give feedback on how to improve the website. It would be much appreciated.
  • Some general UI & UX improvements todo:
    • Colors - Using some general dark mode colors for now, could definitely be improved and give the website more life. Also can make the website clearer.
    • Accessibility - Labeling buttons, link / anchor tags, etc for accessibility.
    • Readability - Some parts are lengthy, hard to read. I’ve tried to my best to divide it into short bullet points but it can definitely be improved further.
• SEO
  • Adding tags for sharing on different social media websites.
• Performance
  • Though Astro is very fast, there are still things that can can be improved

Tools Used:

• Framework: Astro
• Hosting: GitHub Pages
• IDE: VS Code

Icons / Images Used:

• Filter icons created by Saepul Nahwan - Flaticon

If you have any feedback for the website, please contact me.

Thanks for reading the full blog! Or just skipping it to end. Well anyway here’s a fun fact, you can see the progress of the projects page in the thumbnail “Portfolio Project”.