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+date = 2020-12-27
+title = "Redesigning My Website: The 5 KB Result"
+description = "A retrospective on my recent website redesign."
++++
+
+# A Brief History
+
+As a form of continuous learning and entertainment, I've been running a
+handful of websites since 2016 when I took my first programming courses
+in college. I maintain one main website, the place I consider the
+official website to represent me. Under this site, I have a handful of
+subdirectories and subdomains.
+
+One of the parts I've enjoyed the most about web development is the
+aspect of designing an identity for a web page and working to find
+exciting ways to display the site's content. Inevitably, this means
+I've changed the designs for my websites more times than I could
+possibly count. Since I don't really host anything on my main webpage
+that's vital, it allows me the freedom to change things as inspiration
+strikes.
+
+Historically, I've relied on core utilities for spacing, components,
+and layouts from [Bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com) and added custom
+CSS for fonts, accents, colors, and other items. I also tend to create
+sites with no border radius on items, visible borders, and content that
+takes up the entire screen (using whitespace inside components instead
+of whitespace around my components).
+
+# The Redesign Process
+
+About a week ago, I found myself wishing for a new design yet again. The
+prior design was largely inspired by IBM's [Carbon Design
+System](https://www.carbondesignsystem.com) and relied on jQuery,
+Bootstrap, along with some compressed
+[.webp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP) images.
+
+To anyone who knows my preferences toward web design - and even in my
+personal life - it should be no surprise that I immediately started
+looking for inspiration on minimalism. While there are some decent
+minimalistic designs on sites like
+[Dribbble](https://dribbble.com/search/shots/popular/web-design?q=minimalism),
+people seem to mostly discuss [brutalist web
+design](https://brutalist-web.design) when you ask about minimalism.
+While brutalist web design doesn't have to be minimal, it often is.
+
+I suppose, in a way, I did create a brutalist website since my HTML is
+semantic and accessible, hyperlinks are colored and underlined, and all
+native browser functions like scrolling and the back button work as
+expected. However, I didn't think about brutalism while designing these
+sites.
+
+The new design followed a simple design process. I walked through the
+screens on my blog and asked myself: "Is this element necessary for a
+user?" This allowed me to first start by removing all javascript, which
+had the sole purpose of allowing users to open a collapsed navbar on
+mobile. Replacing the collapsible navbar allowed me to remove both
+jQuery and Bootstrap's javascript.
+
+Next, I removed things like author names (since I'm literally the only
+person who will ever write on this site), multiple ways to click on a
+blog post card, blog post descriptions, and the scroll-to-top button. It
+also helped to move all categories to a single page, rather than have
+each category on its own page.
+
+The final big piece to finish the
+"[KonMari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo#KonMari_method)"-like
+part of my process was to remove Bootstrap CSS in its entirety. However,
+this meant pulling out a few very useful classes, such as `.img-fluid`
+and the default font stacks to keep in my custom CSS.
+
+After removing all the unnecessary pieces, I was finally able to
+reorganize my content and add a very small amount of custom CSS to make
+everything pretty. This took a brief amount of time, effectively just
+consisting of me converting `<div>` tags into things like
+`<ul>` lists and choosing accent colors.
+
+# The Results
+
+## Reflection
+
+So, what did all of this reorganizing do to my webpages? Well, first, my
+websites are now **ridiculously fast**. Since the prior designs were
+also minimal and didn't have many images, they measured up in
+Firefox's Network Monitor around 300 KB - 600KB. After making the
+changes, my main site is at 5 KB transferred (22 KB total), and my blog
+is at 6.5 KB transferred (13 KB total). **That means the redesigned
+pages are less than 2% the size of the old designs.**
+
+Google Lighthouse ranks the new webpage as 100 in performance,
+accessibility, and best practices, with SEO at 92 since they think tap
+targets are not sized appropriately for mobile users. First contextual
+paints of the pages are under 0.8 seconds with 0 ms of blocking time.
+However, the blog subdomain ranks at 100 for all four categories! First
+contextual paints of the blog homepage are under 1.0 seconds with 0 ms
+of blocking time, due to the fact that the CSS for my blog is within a
+separate CSS file, and the CSS for my main website is simply embedded in
+the HTML file.
+
+Now that everything is complete, I can confidently say I'm happy with
+the result and proud to look at the fastest set of websites I've
+created so far.