A Brand New Site

• #Personal News
• #Website Updates

If you’re a returning visitor to this site you may have noticed that things have changed! I’ve completely redesigned this site from the ground up and, in my opinion, it’s a huge upgrade from every previous version of this website.

A bit of history

I started sharing my photography on my own website sometime around 2015. At that time, I was publishing under the SerialPhotog.com domain. Over time, I slowly changed to publishing under the site’s current domain, AdamThompsonPhoto.com. Throughout all of this, I’ve gone through a number of iterations of the website.

The very first version of my photography site was a Wordpress site that used some pre-made theme. I later switched to a Squarespace site and later a version where my portfolio was hosted on SmugMug and the blog on Ghost. I bounced around between these solutions a number of times over the years. The most recent version I had before this one was back on Squarespace. Each of these had certain advantages, but they all had plenty of downsides as well.

For starters, all of these solutions limit how much control I have over the website. Of the old solutions, Wordpress had the most flexibility, but you still had to work within using Wordpress’s theme and plugin ecosystem. Additionally, Wordpress isn’t exactly known for its stellar security reputation or for being highly performant. All of the other platforms had a whole slew of limitations and also locked me in to a particular vendor. Squarespace, however, was the straw that broke the camel’s back for this redesign.

While there are some nice things I can say about Squarespace, they’ve really gone down hill recently. I have no doubt that this is a direct result of them being acquired in a private equity deal. Regardless, the service kept getting more expensive while the product kept getting, in my opinion, worse. On top of this, using Squarespace completely locks you in to their system, which you have virtually no control over. All in all, it was clear that my days with Squarespace were numbered.

The Redesign

So, I knew that it was time to change the site again, but it was time to figure out what to move to. At this point, I was really sick of the expense and limitations of all the other platforms I had tried. The more I mulled my options, the more I realized that the proper solution was to build something myself.

I was already using Hugo for my tech website and had been very happy with it. I decided that I would base the new design on this website generator.

After a few months of work to come up with the design, code it up, and move all of the content over, I ended up with the design you see today. I’m using a completely custom, extremely light-weight, hugo theme. I wanted the site to be as simple and performant as possible. There’s no unnecessary JavaScript and minimal CSS. There’s absolutely no analytics scripts tracking users and no heavy advertising scripts. It’s exactly what a website should be!

Performance

As I mentioned, performance was a huge focus point for me with this redesign. My goal was to get this site as performant as possible, which can be challenging for a very image heavy site, such as this one. For our baseline, let’s look at the performance metrics of the old Squarespace site.

Oof, talk about dreadful!

To achieve my performance goals, I used the following guiding principles for the redesign:

1. The site should use as little dynamic content as possible. Given that the new site is completely static, this one was simple!
2. Use modern image formats with sane sizes and caching policies.
3. Use as little JavaScript and CSS as possible while still enabling the desired functionality.
4. Don’t disrespect a user’s privacy with invasive tracking scripts and heavy advertising.

Let’s take a look at the performance of the new site, which was designed with all of these principles in mind.

I think it’s safe to say that I met my goals!

Site features

One thing that you may notice is that the new website doesn’t look drastically different from the old one. That’s by design! Overall, I was fairly happy with the layout of the old site. The big difference is that this new site achieves virtually the same layout with significantly less bloat.

The biggest visual difference of this new site is that it now has a dark mode. The site will automatically choose between the dark or light design based on your operating system’s preferences, but you can always change it using the button in the header. Other than that, a lot of the site looks very similar to the old one and supports most all of the same features. Everything from image galleries to site search is supported by my custom theme.

One of the best features of the new site is that I’m not in any way locked in to any one platform. Even with the site being built with Hugo, I’m in no way locked in to that decision. All of the site content is written in markdown and the generated site is just regular ol’ HTML. The hardest part of moving to a different static site generator would be porting my custom theme to it, though even that wouldn’t be too hard. I would even have the option of porting this Hugo site to my own, custom, static site generator should the need ever arise. This new setup gives me a huge amount of freedom!

Cost

One of my favorite aspects of this redesign is the cost of hosting this site! But, before we look at the cost of hosting this new site, let’s look at some of the costs of my old setups.

• SmugMug + Ghost: $282/year for SmugMug + $180/year for Ghost = $462/year.
• Wordpress: The price varies wildly, but you’re looking at a minimum of $120/year just for hosting. Even then, you’ll likely end up paying for a number of plugins, so the cost ends up being somewhat comparable to Squarespace, if not more.
• Squarespace: $262/year, though they’re constantly raising their prices as of late.

As you can see, with all of these solutions, you’re likely going to be spending $200 or more a year for hosting.

So, how much does it cost to host my new site, you ask? Zip, Zero, Nada. That’s right, I host this site completely free of cost on Cloudflare Pages. The usage limits for this setup is quite generous and more than covers my needs for this site. Even if that were to change, I could host this on a very minimal VPS for around $5/month because this site is just a simple static site. So, my worst case scenario is that, at some point in the future, Cloudflare reduces their usage tiers and I have to go host this site myself for about $60/year. Even if that happens, I’m still saving a significant amount of money!

What’s next?

Honestly, I think this may be the final setup for this site. By that, I don’t mean that I won’t make any changes to or improve the design. I just mean that I don’t foresee myself ever moving away from this static solution. Even if I should end up needing some new functionality in the future, I can just implement that all myself.

I will be continuing to make small tweaks to the site over time. You can keep track of the changes I make in the changelog.

Hopefully you all like the new design as much as I do!