I used to have a habit of refreshing my website at the end of each year, but I missed a couple and then it became in my head a bigger project that was a discouraging combination of feeling both pointless and overwhelming.
But on a productive tear (with Claude) during the winter break, I finally added it to my Trello board of projects, and sat down to do it. In the end, it was just a bit stale and messy, and wasn’t that big a job.
Site wise I:
- Updated the theme (from Twenty Twenty to Twenty Twenty Three) – a similar clean and modern theme built on the block editor, just a bit newer. The big difference is the three column layout on the home page.
- Added the Auto Featured Images plugin to make everything look right.
- Removed a bunch of obsolete plugins, mostly ones that were deactivated or were needed before the block based editor.
- Installed WPConsent to make the website EU compliant. I think it’s just comments as I don’t use Google analytics or anything. But someone left a comment and I figured I may as well action it.
Content wise I:
- Revamped the navigation
- Created a resources page to collect things like my newsletter, book, and the EM slack
- Updated social links
- Put in some subtle (I hope) book promotion
In the current era of social media, it feels more important than ever to me to have a space on the web that I control and can rely on. It’s not cheap though, it probably costs in the region of ~1K USD annually. Which includes:
- Hosting on Pressable (expensive but very performant, especially for a large site)
- Buttondown subscription for two newsletters
- Additional hosting on Dreamhost for other projects that require less bandwidth
- So many domains
I’ve been writing consistently for what feels like forever. 1K/year to maintain that feels really worthwhile to me, but I understand why it would not seem like a great investment if you were thinking about starting a site today.
The reason why my site got stale is because I always prioritise regular content over the potential rabbit hole of making the site better. I still recommend that as an approach – before setting anything up, write 4-6 posts you’re actually willing to hit publish on. There are free alternatives to everything I use (except the domains), but do at least make sure you can export and switch if you decide to move later.
Anyway, all in all I’m so glad I got everything updated. It feels like a nicer place to work from! And as I lean into experimenting with AI as a productivity tool, it is a great example of how it can lower the activation energy and make what could be a tedious chore move a bit faster.