Today the one thing that I'd like to discuss is design, and consistency of it. When I started out on the rebuild I had a visual target to achieve, that of the old website, but I also wanted to refine and change things that didn't make me happy as well. But the problem is, I made everything look alike! No matter where you look its the same and thats becuase I'm not much of a designer and thats something I'm hoping to address before too long, whether it be solicit advice online, hire someone, or just keep doing my things and pray. The real issue though? With the migration to styled-components and the ability to break up the CSS into components i quickly found myself rewriting CSS over and over for different thngs that were visually the same and that lead to inconsistencies within. I've begun the process of combining down similar components and migrating the CSS into more specific components rather than overall in different places. Sidebars for example.
I had about three different variants of sidebars without realizing it and each had its own spacing, fonts, font sizes etc, now there is one with ability to swap out internals of them based on whats supplied and making more pieces of them optional so that the pieces can all be used without depending on it all being there or breaking. Because of this change though progress on the website has slowed down, not as much has been added as i've been spending a lot of time refactoring existing code to accomplish this goal. Sometimes I set myself with too high of expectations on what I can handle in one day and I feel like i'm falling behind on my target, however I know this is in constant flux because of lack of design or really any formal documentation of what to build and how to make it look.
The good news though is that i've built out the contact page so you can finally reach me, however its not finished either as i don't handle things so gracefully and need to make it more robust, add some toast notifications rather than using an alert, and just general refinment for mobile across the site. But thats on the agenda. Thanks to apps like Trello though this process is much easier to document.