I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.
Style changes don’t apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can’t change the font in the footer even though there’s a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can’t move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can’t seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that’s just a theme issue?). I’d like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I’m annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don’t want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!
edit: also, if there’s a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!
The question is how complex your personal website should be and how frequently you want to update it. A CMS gives you comfort in editing it, but you need to babysit the hell out of it, especially Wordpress.
I did my personal website just by myself. My both css files (regular and imprint) are together around 600 lines. It includes custom fonts (Google Fonts locally hosted), some animations and responsive design for smaller screens. My JS is 70 lines long and handles highlighting of the current site and an accordion. My site does work without JS. I do use PHP, mostly for including footer and header to each site. I did some crazy stuff as an experiment to protect my email and stuff, but it didn’t worked.
Lets be honest, with AI you could create a site with ease and without using a CMS and other fancy stuff, this will be safe. Just look what JS and other things do get included and be sure it’s nothing external. When you really want it to make it yourself, I would say learn the basics and copy stuff from themes and stuff like bootstrap.
Honestly though, I would say in these days, you don’t need a flashy theme. My theme is very simple. I have alternating light and dark backgrounds, to separate sections. Some good placements of objects, a different font and an accent color. The only thing I really don’t like is how much I wrote. But when I did it, there was no AI. But I must mention, that the leading dev of my company actually looked at my site and mentioned it that he liked it. I’m not sure if other companies where I applied, really looked at my site. The companies who did invite me only invited me to basically say that they have no room for an inexperienced dev. The company that took me said to me, I know the basic stuff and the rest I will learn.