Top reasons to keep your own site

How I got here

Since 2008 until today, this site featured the same patterns most people in the industry followed: a Portfolio, an About Me, a Skillset and –of course– a blog.

The portfolio became irrelevant for two main reasons:

  • How quickly everything becomes out of date in the Internet. The first sites I helped to build have either disappeared or had a major facelift.
  • I work in a company focused in improving and keeping up to date two main products. It makes no sense keeping an updated portfolio for just two sites.

The featured skillset and About Me also became obsolete. I see no point in keeping them up to date having around tools like LinkedIn or Twitter.

Finally, like many peers, I abandoned the blog. I find writing quite relaxing. It helps me structure my ideas and, I think, that makes me improve as a designer. But I didn't find the time or had any interesting subject to write about.

My site ended up looking like many others around: unnecessary. At basecamp.com they pointed out this issue really well in Asking why.

From now on, I'll mainly rely on LinkedIn and Twitter for my Portfolio, About Me and Skillset.

I could also blog in a 3rd party platform, but I find interesting to control and experiment with some things these platforms don't allow.

The reasons

This site should be a continous Work/Learn In Progress with the following points:

  • The tools. Almost every week (or day!) there's something new to keep up to date. Here I can experiment as much as I like.
    • The markup. Being able to improve it with ARIA landmarks, microdata, etc.
    • The styling. Using preprocessors such as SASS.
    • Static-site builders like Jekyll (as of the writing of this post).
  • Performance (I): I don't need a server requesting data to a database to build dynamically a navigation menu or the posts, not even the comments having -again- twitter.
  • Performance (II): I can choose where I want to host my site. Amazon Cloudfront seemed a nice place, as a matter of performance.

TL;DR

Learning is a continuous process. By writing, you force yourself to read, research, compare, analyse. That makes you learn eventually.

Also, working in the frontend, it's interesting to keep absolute control on how your site is being built and served to the user.

I might write some poor posts, or make bad design decissions, in this site; but that's part of the learning process.