Building My Website - The idea and choosing the right tool (Part 1)

I’m starting a series of articles about building my personal website - the very one you’re reading now. Since this is a broad topic, I’ll break it down into multiple parts:

1. The idea and choosing the right tool
2. SEO essentials: meta tags and base head element
3. Content management with Markdown and Frontmatter
4. Semantic HTML for accessibility and external readers
5. Minimalist CSS: styling and native-like design
6. Adding color themes with JavaScript
7. Astro plugins: RSS, Sitemap, Word count
8. SVG icons and Favicon
9. Building resume with XeLaTeX
10. Extras

The Idea

I’ve had the idea of creating a personal website before, but my earlier attempts fell short. This time, I wanted to approach it more deliberately. Here’s what I aimed to achieve:

• Self-introduction: A place to share basic information about myself for visitors.
• Blogging: A platform to publish my thoughts, with full control over content. I prefer writing in Markdown (using Obsidian) and simply copying files to GitHub when ready.
• Flexibility: Room for non-blog pages if needed.
• Best practices: Fast loading, simplicity, and adherence to modern web standards.

Choosing the right tool

For a lightweight, fast-loading site, a static website was the obvious choice - it’s also easier to host and deploy. Static Site Generators (SSGs) are made for this, so I explored a few:

• Jekyll
• Hugo
• 11ty

But each had hurdles: unfamiliar languages (Ruby, Go), cumbersome setups, or excessive configuration. Frustrated, I finally discovered Astro - and it was a game-changer.

Astro is a static site generator with optional server-side or client-side reactivity (using modern frameworks). It offers:

• Simple defaults for quick setup.
• Powerful integrations (like RSS feeds) without complexity.
• Flexibility without bloat.

I read through Astro’s documentation and loved it. It was the perfect fit - and I was sold.