Website rebuild

In this post, I explain some thinking and process that went into my 2025 website rebuild. Specifically:

1. Why I switched to WordPress
2. Design inspiration
3. How I built my moodboard
4. Quotes in the footer

WordPress

Thanks to writing by Simon and Henrik, and encouragement from my friends Michelle and Jamie, I decided to blog again.

Again? Yup.

I used to blog (a lot..) from 2004 to 2018. Much of that was on my personal blog powered by WordPress. I loved WordPress! It worked well for me.

In my decision to return to blogging though, I thought, WordPress is kinda dated. Maybe this is my chance to start fresh with the latest and greatest web tech. *cracks knuckles*

Let’s see…

• Astro plays nice with React
• Jekyll plays nice with Obsidian
• Ghost does membership well
• Substack has a decent social layer
• Buttondown because newsletters, maybe?
• 11ty? Astro? Webflow? Kirby? Next.js? Hugo? Gatsby? Framer? Notion? Craft? Paragraph? Google Docs? Bear blog? ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ …

… FML.

Next thing I knew, I was in the deep end of tooling: researching, fiddling around, and NOT blogging.

Hello decision paralysis, my old friend.

After months of getting distracted by features I didn’t need, I got fed up and realized my needs were actually quite simple:

1. Ease. A blog I could easily set up and customize
2. Solved. A product mature enough that most problems have been reliably solved (via plugins, developer community, or Reddit comments)

Distilling my decision to these two factors quickly made WordPress the obvious choice for me. I know PHP better than React. I like CMSs more than SSGs. I prefer granular customization over opinionated defaults.

Most importantly: my years of using WordPress actually means I have more experience with it than any other platform. My experience building with WordPress means I know how to work with its drawbacks.

WordPress is familiar to me. It’s not perfect, and I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it works great for me. Turns out, WordPress works well enough for a lot of other people too. 43.3% of all websites use WordPress.

Let me be clear: WordPress has many drawbacks.

Compared to some modern solutions, it’s quite bad at performance. And the UX can be overwhelming. And, unlike static sites which you can build and deploy for free, WordPress requires a subscription or a server to run it. I pay for a cPanel’d server with NixiHost because I would (personally) rather use that than have to set up GCP, AWS, or DigitalOcean.

Infrastructure does not bring me joy. I’d rather focus on what does. Know thyself, etc.

Anyway, I digress. This is not about WordPress! This is about the meta of tools. In case you need reminding like I did: there are many ways to do things! Use what feels easy to use. WordPress is easy for me. Use what’s easy for you.

Design

The design is inspired by the sites of Steph, Tom, and Zinzy. The font is Gothic A1. For emphasis, Cormorant.

Theme development

People have asked me how I go about developing WordPress themes. I like to build from the first ever WordPress theme: Classic.

I love starting here because the theme has no dependencies, there’s no bloat, the code is very readable, and the PHP is easy to work with. It’s not for everyone but it’s a great starting point for me.

That led to this.

Will I publish my theme? Not planning on it. You are, of course, welcome to draw inspiration from my website to design and build your own. Please let me know if you do! I’d love to check out your website.

Moodboard

I love moodboards (and collections in general) because you can tell a lot about a person from what (and how) they curate. While I have many (!) Pinterest boards for hobbies and projects, I wanted my website to have just one moodboard to showcase what I vibe with most.

The result: my moodboard!

I built this using…

• Media Library Organizer to categorize media in WordPress
• A custom plugin I wrote to sync the moodboard to my media categories
• Masonry for the dynamic layout
• Isotope for buttery smooth filtering
• lightGallery for viewing/browsing images fullscreen

I’m happy with the result!

Eventually, I’d like some way to showcase non-visual things that have influenced me, such as music, essays, and people. Maybe I’ll use Pinboard or Raindrop, or make a page similar to Sam’s Links.

Quotes

I love quotes so much that I have them in 3 places:

1. My moodboard, under Words
2. My quotes page
3. The footer of my website

My footer is inspired by the footer of Justin’s website where clicking the quote shows another quote! I found that interaction endlessly delightful, so I immediately knew I wanted the same.

I made mine with Javascript. Here’s the JSON file of the quotes in my footer, if you want to see them all.

Closing thoughts

That covers all I have to say about this rebuild and my return to WordPress. If you’re curious to see previous iterations of my personal site, my website history is archived here.

Special thanks to Kasra, Matthew, Shaiyan, Leanne, Jamie, Michelle, Melody, Mutammim, and Anna Lisa.