Redesigning the website once again

I’m not a designer, but it’s fun and a good exercise; it’s part of my day-to-day job. This time, I tried to open up the design and layout, creating more blank space and making it more airy. I took a sneak peek at the relatively new Neva Wargame site, which I like (https://nevawargames.com/). I took some ideas straight out of their site—no shame :)

I also split the review and blog sections up so as not to muddle things between the two and to give the occasional visitor an easier choice of what they want to read (or not). This division will also suit the upcoming product section and when the blog section starts supporting the design diary. I might split them up further—we’ll have to see.

I also implemented ISLANDS for the first time.

What, come again, ISLANDS?

The site is an SSG (Server-Side Generated) site (using the Astro framework). All the pages are generated when deployed to the server. They are standard old-fashioned HTML pages/web pages. It’s quick, and there’s not much hassle. The time for each page load is kept to a minimum. But this comes at a “price”. There’s no real interactivity, such as fancy forms, filters, searches, or on-demand data loading from a server/backend. Then again, the site information is static, so there’s not much need for that level of interactivity.

But once again, as a front-end architect and developer, I like to add fancy functions to play around with. So, to do that —at least with this technique— you add islands. Islands with interactivity. I’ve done this in the form of a filtered list. Head over to the Articles pagen (https://www.pm-production.nu/articles) and have a look. That page has an interactive tag filter that filters a list of all the articles on the site. Articles include all the blogs and reviews. Enjoy :) (It’s nothing new and not rocket science :) but fun to play around with).

Have a good one!
//Jörgen