Building a static website

Published and updated date of webpage. 17-NOV-2025

Published posts

Building a static website blog post series. Look at the first blog post or later on this page for background on this project.

Background and overview

Amazingly, I first registered the domain (saxbynet.com) on which this site is hosted, way back in 2002 and have had a personal website at that address, in one form or another, from around that time. However, I have not tended to regularly update it most of the time and it has never really been properly designed. This is now something I want to put right, especially as I do have the time to do so and have made some efforts on and off over the years.

Therefore, recently I took the decision to imagine designing my personal website from scratch and documenting the process of doing that through a series of blog posts. It is not entirely a clean sheet of paper, in the sense that I have taken some ideas from what I have done already, but I'm now trying to approach things in a more focused and logical way.

Why am I doing it this way?

There are of course plenty of static website generators and a new wave of AI-based site builders, so it's worth exploring why I'm doing it "the hard way".

If this were some kind of professional or commercial venture, it is highly likely that I would use one of the many services available to create it, but this is just a personal project and by building it myself, I'm going to learn a lot more than I would by using some other approach. It is also going to take lot longer, but that's fine, because it's all part of what I'm trying to achieve. DIY is the entire point of the exercise.

How are these blog posts organised?

One thing that is important to understand is that I am definitely building the ship while it's sailing. That means that I'm doing my best to make each separate blog post reflect the situation at the time of writing. For example, each post has its own separate CSS file, rather than a central one that I change over time. This allows me to make changes without affecting the existing posts, which gives a much better idea of how things are evolving as I try things out. Naturally, once I am finally in a position to have a design that I am happy with, future articles would then make use of what I've learned and I would have a central CSS file and icon set and so on.

I'm also intending to avoid making big updates to published blog posts. That isn't a strict rule, as there may be some circumstances where that is unavoidable, but it is once again aimed at trying to leave things largely looking as they did when I originally wrote to that particular post. Having said that, in the majority of cases, when I add a new blog post, I do go back to the previous one and update it to add a link to the latest post.

Note that this particular page is an exception, because clearly I will need to add links to the latest articles as they are published. I will also continue to update the CSS associated with this page.

Other considerations