This site

This is a site created for the 30 Days Writing Challenge in April 2017.

It’s built from the ground up and uses Perch Runway as the content management system.

Initially, the site will be simple. I’m aiming to write about building the site for the Challenge. I’d like to create a site that is quite minimalist though (more on that below).

Why create a new site?

The 30 Days Writing Challenge asks you to write something every day for April. Not publish something, just write. Yet, when I signed up and thought it through, I realised that creating a new site would give me something to write about.

Also, I have other personal sites where I can write posts so this new site can pull together some of those.

And after the challenge ends, I can use the site for articles that don’t fit elsewhere.

Building the site

I was thinking about how to make faster sites recently. Usually, I take an existing site that’s live or almost completed, run it through site speed tests, and improve it by, for example, adding compression, minifying and combining CSS and JS files, and optimising images.

That’s great but it’s always working with a site that has a lot of resources. I wondered whether it would be better to just create a minimalist site in the first place. And to place more emphasis on page performance earlier in the process. I’m sure many of you do this already but I don’t.

So, for this site, I’ll be testing page speed and performance at every step, trying not to make assumptions, and creating the site in a different way. For example, the first few iterations of the site won’t have a style sheet. I’ll add the first items of content before I think about CSS.

And, I want to build a site using Grid Layout as the primary layout method from the start. This gives me a chance to do that and learn more about grid.

This is the first post on the site and my first day’s writing. Only another 29 days to go!