I usually use my articles to tell people what to do based on my past mistakes, but that's boring, so here you go, an article of what not to do, based on what I currently do.

The website you are currently on is the result of a lot of semi-deliberate decisions designed to make it easy to work on. That's not to say it's good or bad in it's design, just that it was made to a pretty specific standard. This is trademarkHELL afterall, not trademarkIMakeHightEffortContent, afterall.

Every time I write a post, there's literally nothing I have to do outside of clicking the commit button when I'm done typing it. I have absolutely zero involvement with the HTML and CSS of this site after I finish whatever layout it has at the time. It's all handled by the SSG, or static site generator, which you can look up if you don't know about them.

This sounds nice, and I love it, because I don't like web development that much anyways, but honestly, it's one of the worst things you can do with a personal site. I've always been a major proponent of SSGs, and I still am for sites solely dedicated to blogs (such as this one), but I also think they can be a trap.

A large part of what controls the quality of a personal site is that it takes a decent amount of effort to even make a new page, unless you have 5,000 boiler plate layouts ready to go. With an SSG it just becomes a circlejerk of getting out as many posts/pages as possible so that you'll see the view number go up. (remind you of a site?).

This is awesome for the first week or two, until you realize that your hobby just became another mundane task that you put zero effort into. It's not like you can just stop using one either, I'd be lying if SSGs didn't make everything easier, there's no way I'm going back.

Just maybe consider what you want your site to be before you listen to somebody (like me) who hypes them up as the second coming of Christ which will forever change your website for the better. Do you want a hobby or a task? I'm indifferent, and that's why the site you're on looks the way it does. TM out.