dysphoric.dev

Behind this blogs simplistic design

I am no frontend designer.

That's a fact. While I do enjoy full stack development, my skills mostly are in the backend part. (This is similar for most full-stack devs I know. Design is difficult, y'know?) I still wanted to build a website that was no eyesore. I also wanted to use minimal javascript (especially for the user facing parts of the site) and I wanted to get done with it in a pretty short time.

The solution was to use a technology I already know (Bootstrap and Laravel/ Blade) and use as many default classes as I could. I know that the default values in bootstrap are pretty accessible and don't look too bad. I actually did not write a single line of css for this (yet) Way to go, me, invalidating a blogpost in the same evening.. Well, I did only write a tiny amount of css. I am planning on adding more stuff but right now it is that way and I think that is okay.

I also wanted the blog to look okay on mobile because most people browse the internet on their phones these days. I think I partially achieved this goal. I just remembered I still have to push a fix for the weird margins and having the sidebar at the bottom probably won't scale too well as soon as I get a little more content. This will definitely be changed at some point in the (hopefully) near future.

For design, I looked at some of the blogs I usually read and.. realised that they don't actually fit a personal blog. I mostly read the blogs of information security companies and they are all built to sell their products. -not really something I want to do with this website. I ended up taking inspiration from Compass Security because the previous sentence does not really apply to them. You can definitely see that I "stole" their layout and placement of some elements.

I am still planning to change the design up a bit so it shows more of my personality but for the moment, I think it's pretty okay. Forcing myself to build something this minimal allowed me to focus more on usability and less on flashy stuff that'll look terrible in a few years and perform even worse on devices that aren't "high end."