This is the 10th and final post in the building kits-dna series. This post wraps up series, summarising what we've learnt and what's next.

My goal with this series of posts was to show non engineers/developers that it's easy to build their own website. Hopefully reading this series has shown that and inspired you to try it! Even if it’s just cloning my repo or using a Jekyll theme, with a couple of new skills it’s easy, and fun to do… even on an iPad.

In this series we’ve covered:

Post Technology
Building My Personal Website... kits-dna GitHub, GitHub Pages, Git
How to Use an iPad or Tablet to Create a Website GitHub Codespaces
How to Get Started Building Your Website Jekyll
How to Customise the Appearance of Your Website CSS
Build Gotcha's on GitHub Pages Liquid
How to Make Your Website Look Good on Mobile Responsive Design
How to Add Simple Analytics to Your Website Simple Analytics
How to Add a Favicon to Your Website Favicon
How to Add a Custom Domain to Your Website DNS, Squarespace

This covers the basics of building your own website. I haven't covered everything and there's lots more you could do, but you don't need lots of JavaScript to make your site dynamic when getting started.

Iterating

Like a product, I’ll continue to improve and iterate kits-dna. Some ideas / opportunities include:

  • Google Lighthouse
  • Adding Search
  • Post Comments
  • Email Subscription
  • Non GitHub Pages Hosting
  • Minima v3
  • Jekyll

I’ll be doing the lighthouse testing soon as this could improve a number of facets of the site from accessibility to search engine optimisation (SEO).

I want to learn more about cloud platforms too, so hosting away from GitHub Pages is tempting, on a platform like Netlify, Azure Static Web Apps or AWS Amplify.

Minima v3 is an interesting one. It’s not an official release but as this series has covered I’ve changed the CSS to where an update would be breaking for me. Maybe I'll create my own Jekyll theme :test_tube:

Beyond Jekyll

Thinking about Minima v3, there's an opportunity to look beyond Jekyll. Jekyll is no longer actively updated or released. There are other static site generators, that are actively maintained, for example Hugo has had 7 releases on GitHub since the start of November, Jekyll has had 1 all year!

I might experiment with Hugo for a wee project I have in mind. If this goes well, I might be tempted to convert kits-dna especially if it adds features out of the box like search. However, as long as GitHub Pages supports Jekyll we’ll be good :smile:

Wrap Up

That’s it! Let me know if this series of posts have helped you build your first website, I’d love your feedback. Check out my Contact Me page or hit the social icons in the footer to connect.

Stay tuned to my blog for future posts as I iterate kits-dna explore new projects and skills, and write about product.

Thanks for reading :call_me_hand: