Refresh

As frequent visitors to this site may have noticed, I have recently refreshed this site’s design, and whilst it is still nothing fancy (for I am no designer!), it maintains its minimalistic approach and focus on content but hopefully should be a little faster.

One of the main things I decided to drop was web fonts, as I decided that there is no real need for them and they can often be a speed bottleneck, cause FOUT, and of course add additional HTTP requests. The font stack is set to “Georgia, Cambria, ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif”, which should be enough for most users.

I also decided to put my recently received skills with Grunt and Sass to use, and the styling for the entire site – WordPress theme included – is now written in Sass and built with Grunt. The main site’s pages remain in plain old HTML.

Throughout the site I have tried to minimise the use of JavaScript, indeed the main site pages only use Google Analytics, and the blog uses a slightly modified version of the Plum Code Box plugin for displaying code samples, and Live Comment Preview to allow users to preview their comment before submittal.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is also used to concatenate the various JavaScript files that are used within the WordPress blog and thus reducing the site’s footprint even further, and of course it also builds a cache of the blog’s pages for faster retrieval.

This, of course, remains a work in progress, and changes will constantly be made, as developers, we are never fully happy with our own site.

Feedback is of course welcome.