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Why Relaunching My Personal Website Was Harder Than I Expected (and Why the To-Do List Never Ends)Why Relaunching My Personal Website Was Harder Than I Expected (and Why the To-Do List Never Ends)

Published at Nov 2024

Releasing a new website is supposed to be a moment of triumph. You hit "publish," you see your work live, and you bask in the satisfaction of completing something significant. But actually building (and rebuilding) a website is an ongoing process that doesn’t have a “final” version. There’s always something to tweak, something to optimize, and something to perfect.

This article is about sharing that feeling, reflect on the journey and plainly to note a few open To-Do's and open Questions.

The Never-Ending To-Do List

Even though my website is live if you read this… My to-do list is still full of tasks that will likely never be fully checked off. There’s always something I could improve, whether it’s refining my layout, optimizing the performance, or trying out new features. Always being close to release, I find myself staring at a never-ending to-do list of things I should have done, features I could add, and problems I hadn’t even anticipated. It felt like the moment I solved one issue, another popped up. Especially since I just started my journey to get back into coding and learning Next, Node and React.

There’s always room for growth and improvement. And while I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, I know that there will always be more I want to learn and experiment with.

So here is my personal List of things that I will enjoy looking into, once I got the release out of the way:

General To-Dos
  • Improve vertical rythm and baseline grid alignment, maybe using CSS round() function
  • Decide on CSS variables and how I want to use them together with tailwind
  • Reduce the use of arbitrary values in tailwind classes and a add more custom classes to the tailwind.config
  • Check the tailwind.config for custom classes that where added in development but not anymore needed
  • Decide on using the custom vertical Breakpoints or removing them from tailwind.config
  • Add aria tags everywhere
  • Try opting for grid or flex layout as the primary layout method and reduce the use of the other layout method
  • Add localization and German locale
  • Dive deeper into motion and add a few motion and animatePresence tags into the components
  • Better optimize Images when loading and check if assets and nodes are actually loading when I think they are
To-Dos for single Components
  • Animate the actual vertices of the BlobSvg component, instead of morphing between different predefined blob shapes and compare performance
  • Get a bit more creative with the BlobSvg styling, there was a lot skipped for a quick release
  • Rework the OutlineText component
  • Create component for the HorizontalScroller that is currently just part of the portfolio index
To-Dos for the Blog
  • Add taxonomy for tags
  • Add categories for Log and Lab
  • Create cards or pages for browsing tags or create a filterable or sortable index list for the blog
  • Find and decide for one solution with that i want to present and share code
  • Create a first Lab entry and share an experiment or asset with others
  • Write more Log entries

Final Thoughts

Remember, the launch is just the beginning. The real work happens after. And even when it feels like there’s always something left to do, that’s part of the beauty of the process. Keep learning. Keep building. And above all, keep going.