Portfolio redesign 2026

I’m convinced that this website gets an almost yearly redesign. I’m just never happy with my site design (sigh), which I believe is because I still don’t know which direction I want to take this site down. Like am I actually targeting potential clients for freelance work here, letting recruiters have a look at “what I can do” so I can get hired, or writing a blog that gets read by…no one?

I’ve been recently working on some interesting solutions for Laravel projects with Filament and it doesn’t seem to be documentated elsewhere. I’ve also picked up some new stuff from my studies (like Svelte, Java etc). I have a bunch of recipes (?) or recipe review(s) from my baking. Oh, and I also want to get better at drawing/art this year.

Something is telling me inside…ah, I want to share this!

But my site design is still kind of everything and nothing. But one thing for sure, it just never seemed to be a real place for me to share about anything.

The new design

And so finally…the other day, I found a Hugo theme that seemed very interesting - Reimu. There were several things I really liked about it, but also a few things I didn’t like so much about it.

What I liked

• The page design: It looks super clean and fun. Super coherent to the core theme. More importantly, a good amount of the design contained elements that fit could fit right into my supposed “personal” branding elements (dashed yellow lines, solid green lines).
• The music player: Felt like a great way to jazz up the website. I know my taste in music might be a bit rare because it’s “foreign” music (and also, it’s mostly indie music), but I like it and would love if someone could join me in fangirling over them.
• The actual home page: The fact that the home page looks pretty “personal”…like a place to share my stuff. It’s got a really nice designed info card (avatar, number of articles, social links etc) where I can place some stats and even a place to show my “status”.

Anyway, once I saw this theme, I was basically sold! Unfortunately, using the actual theme was a different story…

What I didn’t like so much

• Pretty opinionated: Basically, this resulted in a lot of scripts that were kind of a pain to turn off. My Hugo site also has a slightly different content structure for my blog (using blog type instead of the classic posts). This was the main reason tbh.
• The loading screen between pages: I’m actually more undecided whether I like this or not. It kind of makes the site feel slower for most people…but it looks good!

Oh whatever, I ended up implementing it my own way in the end so that there’d be less bloat and everything. It’s still pretty similar overall, I’d say.

Going forwards

So the final implementation is…pretty interesting for real. The music player uses Youtube embed under the hood and the page urls are using HTMX. I’ll post the details another day…and now that my site actually looks so much better, hopefully you’ll hear from me soon!