I first began my portfolio site back in 2013 with WordPress and no knowledge of programming whatsoever. Of course, WordPress suited my needs, because I needed a website up and running, and as a young aspiring architect I cared very little about the backend.
Fast forward, nearly 10 years, and now as a graduate of an Angular Front-end bootcamp, I can harness the power of the Angular CLI to get my website up and running. I can easily manipulate the pre-existing html, css, and javascript files of an already developed template to suite my needs. Also, after nearly 10 years of WordPress and navigating the plug-in ecosystem my site has acquired a lot of bloat. Quantitatively, I can tell this to be true when I run the website analysis on PageSpeed Insights. And I have made several attempts to optimize my site.
I have downloaded several optimization WordPress plug-ins, and at times crashed my site , leading to phone calls with friendly IT backend support staff! The issue is that the way my site is currently structured incorporates well-known plug-ins like Elementor and Yoast SEO, which bring in a lot of unncessary code in the back-end. As a developer, I find it frustrating to be unable to manually “go under the hood” and eliminate all this bloat.
Thus, here is my new portfolio site, with my own art style, completely hand-coded, with images designed by me. I hope to make the site more robust with a CMS to better manage the blog posts. Also, the portfolio posts, could be better optimized with arrays. This will come in due time. To a bright Angular future! 😎