Getting Started

This site has somewhat been left to the side a number of times but instead of procrastinating and being somewhat lazy, I’ve gotten around to finally making some changes to the site.

Changes

Well the most obvious change is the overall theme of the site. It’s gone from a slightly modified version of the Archie theme for Hugo to a fully custom made theme using the Skeleton CSS base. It’s MUCH cleaner, sleeker, and just simplified.

One of the key feature changes; no more theme switcher. This wasn’t really used by people (there was events tracking applied via Google Analytics to the switcher to monitor the usage of the feature) so that is now gone!

I’ve chosen a brighter colour than the previous one but it’s still not eyeball burning bright (ok so it is a little but is not pure white!). I’ve kept the same font as well just for consistency’s sake, besides Raleway is pretty clean.

Tracking & Scripts

I have been looking to try and minimize the number of off-site calls for resources. I’ve managed to eliminate most of them, excluding the font above. So there is no longer any tracking completed on this site, meaning no cookies and no required cookie banners.

The only calls that are made now externally are for Google Fonts and I’ll be looking at an alternative to those, maybe to the point of just removing any external font.

For internal scripts there are none any longer.

Images

This is a tough one. There are already minimal images loaded throughout the entire site but the ones that are/were being used can be a little heavy, so I’ll be looking to optimize there a little further still.

Network Speed

So I’ve reached the goal of making this site much faster and more network load friendly. In doing the changes above I’ve managed to shave a further 17kb off the total site size.

With the removal of external fonts I can get that down even further (the fonts account for some 60kb right now while the rest of the pages are less than 7kb total).

I’ll be looking to add further optimizations as I go, these will be mostly in the font department though.