Another Brand New Website Design

Published 2026-02-04, Last Updated: Never

You might have made the astute observation that my website suddenly has an entirely new (and incredibly different) design now!

This has been a long time coming, but I finally had the right inspiration for what I’ve wanted to do. Content on this site has been slow, and that’s mainly been due to the fact that the site’s old design was hindering my progress on actually writing for it. Every time I had some bit of motivation to come back to my website again, I’d sit down in front of it and immediately get caught up in fighting with the layout, or the styling, or some other minor detail instead of just filling out a project page or writing a new blog article. It had gotten to the point where I had essentially given up working on my site because I knew that if I tried I’d just get frustrated by something and give up again. Working on the site wasn’t fun anymore, because it was an ever-expanding mess of complicated layouts and CSS that was hard to actually work with.

That’s where the new design comes in. While I haven’t been writing much on my blog in the past couple years, I’ve certainly been reading other people’s, and it’s given me some good ideas. On top of that, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the state of the internet and how obnoxious a lot of modern websites are to actually navigate when you just want to see the content. I wanted my own website to not be an example of that. And so I landed here.

My goal with this design was to strike a balance between styling things a bit and making them look clean and organized, but then also not making anything too fancy if it didn’t need to be. As soon as I got things layed out in a way that felt practical, I stopped changing it and instead focused on what I actually wanted on the page. This site is definitely meant to be an attempt at returning to an earlier internet’s idea of what a web page should look like, where the main point of the website is the text content and the information that it’s meant to be conveying to the reader. It doesn’t need transparency effects, it doesn’t need fancy cards, and it certainly doesn’t need to be full of giant margins that make individual blocks of content feel like they’re in separate continents.

Regarding that last point, you might (very reasonably) be thinking “wait but isn’t the site literally 50% padding now?” The answer is obviously yes, if you’re on desktop then the left and right sides of your screen are quite empty, but I have a good reason for that. I want my blog articles and other ramblings to be the focus of the website, so having the site be fairly narrow actually helps with that. Books are the width they are for a reason, you can read a lot quicker if you don’t need to scan left to right quite as far each line. I’m trying to save you from having to reset your focus like a typewriter’s carriage return. (Though I will be fully honest, designing it like this also made sure that it worked on mobile with minimal effort, because on mobile it simply uses 100% of your screen width to create an almost identical look to the center column on desktop.)

Aside from style, I also wanted to revise the way I handled the content of the site a bit. Project pages have been killed off, because honestly most of them contained nothing of value. A lot of the project pages on both previous iterations of my site were either blank, or just copy-pasted from the README on GitHub. That isn’t particularly helpful, and also creates a situation where I now had two places that I needed to update information should it ever change. Now, the projects listed on the projects page just link to the appropriate GitHub repo, so you’re immediately presented with all the information you could possibly want. I may look into re-adding pages for projects here if I feel like I have more to say, but I think this is a much better solution for the present. One minor note here is that any project page links will be dead now. I don’t think very many exist out in the wild, but it’s just something to be aware of (and also on that note: blog article links will NOT be broken; I’m still using Jekyll’s posts system so none of those links will have changed upon the release of this iteration of the site). Besides project pages, there have also been some quality of life tweaks with blog articles, like the ability for me to link articles together in a series. Check out any of the Wii DVD image articles, they have next and previous links now!

Finally, my “about me” section really needed some work. My description of myself on the previous version of this site read as follows:

That’s better than I’ve done in the past (oh boy is my about me on the NCX Programming website a strange one), but it wasn’t an amazing description of who I actually am as a person. The new one I wrote for this site isn’t perfect and will likely be revised plenty in the future, but as-is it already paints a much better picture of who I am, what I like, and the things that I do.

Alrighty, I think that’s about all I have to say. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the new site! And if you haven’t seen the old one, the Wayback Machine probably has it? I’d be really surprised if it didn’t. Anyways, as I’m typing these words in particular, it is 2:12 AM for me, which is a tad late for a Tuesday night. I have plenty more blog articles to come now that I’ve built myself a foundation I actually like working on, so stay tuned! I’ve got plenty to say on things like TigerDine, and the Android port of TigerDine, and the whole RNGTool mess, and oh boy I have a lot of writing to do…