Last year, one of my projects was to refresh the interface of a website. There were few, if any, changes to the page structure, user flows, or content. The technical stack remained largely untouched as well, although I did remove a few dependencies and improve loading times. Most of my work focused on layout adjustments, typography, information hierarchy, and simplifying the stylesheets. Even though the redesign was fairly limited in scope, it once again confirmed my interest in UI design. And with this blog, I’d like to take things a little further.
This blog has been around for three years now. Three years on WordPress. At first, it’s convenient and quick to set up. But after repeatedly working around the theme’s limitations, searching for the right plugin, and dealing with updates that inevitably break something, the platform’s shortcomings start to wear on me. The handful of CSS tweaks I’ve layered on top of the default theme don’t really amount to a design process. The content isn’t independent from the platform. The generated page code is heavy. And because every plugin introduces its own structures and styles, any sense of consistency remains largely superficial.
What I want is a site with a deliberate visual identity. A site where photography plays a structural role rather than a merely illustrative one. Where typography is carefully considered—the right typeface, the right quotation marks, the right spacing, the right rhythm. Where every layout decision is intentional. Where consistency is visible at every level.
The technical details haven’t been fully decided yet, but the direction is clear: move away from WordPress and adopt a stack that I understand and control from end to end. The content—text and images—would be stored in portable formats, version-controlled, and rendered statically ahead of time. Dynamic features would be developed as needed using a familiar web framework (Django, for example), without unnecessary third-party services. Sovereignty and pragmatism.
Of course, this redesign won’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term project that I plan to document here as it progresses—the design decisions, technical challenges, dead ends, and course corrections. A series of articles woven in between the blog’s usual posts.