My blog has become complex, maybe it’s time to go back to the basics.

I had turn my blog into a pile of plugins and sluggish place where I feel lazy to write something upon it. It needs to change.

I seem to find myself as an amateur designer, a developer, a maker of random doodles, a medical student and aspire to become more.

I have a blog website and I have been redesigning it for 2 years.

Maybe it is due to my nature.

I get inspired easily with other designers and developer’s stunning portfolios. And I try to imitate their design to mine.

Some portfolios like Tobias van Schneider really inspired me to change my website layout.

I did.

I had hosted my blog website on a friend’s server and installed WordPress on it.

WordPress is a no-code website builder or CMS (Content Management System) where you can build & manage your website from its admin panel.

WordPress is good but I think it has become a lot messy now. Too many plugins to build a good looking website.

Themes have become really annoying with limited features and paywall alerts.

Initially, I had thought that It would be like a personal space on the internet to write and showcase my works but I had made it a mess.

I made a lot of pages on the website such as Hire me, Notes, Projects, UIUX, About, Contact, Doodles, Newsletter and some other non primary pages.

I gradually put my work on it and tried to keep it updated with code projects, design projects, and doodles I did.

And then…

I became lazy and I stopped updating the blog because the process of updating or adding the new stuff was time-taking.

Why was it taking so long? Because I was trying to follow the design guidelines to make it look perfect.

Since the perfect thing doesn’t exist, the blog became toxic and I became too lazy to open the admin panel. I even started writing my blogs on Medium editor primarily instead of WordPress.

I got burned out with my newsletter as well and stopped working on it. (I have gave it a fresh start, take a look here)

I guess it’s time to change it. There are a few things that I need to consider:

Do I need to do SEO or not? Because doing SEO comes with a lot of work and with that I would not be able to write comfortably.
Do I need to show my projects and my designs and my doodles? I should reduce the page numbers to show only limited stuff.
Do I really need WordPress? It makes things easier but gets complex with time.
Aren’t Home page and About Page the same for me? Since I am not in any organization that I need to represent. It’s just me.
Do I want to make money with it? If yes, I will have to perform SEO and all that witchcraft to get listed in search results and I think that If your blog is earning these days, It’s definitely not what we call a personal space on the Internet. You can’t post as you like. There would be SEO plugins and guidelines to keep telling you how to write it the right way for the search engines robots.
One thing I am sure about is that I need a blog that shows no restrictions to me when it comes to writing and sharing my views. It should be a personal corner on the Internet reserved for me without any restrictions.

After brainstorming on it, I have decided that I will be redesigning my entire blog again for the 54th time.

Now I have some inspiration for it. and this time these are basic but interesting websites.

Take a look at these portfolios below. No need to worry about the design or the color palettes or fonts. Look, how fluently they are sharing their views and for such a long time.

I want to exist like these people and keep writing like them.

The process to turn my complex and bulky blog into a very basic form of internet website could be tricky and lengthy.

It would be basically following these works:

I have to backup my current website and replace it with a very simplistic and text based theme on WordPress.
I have to make sure that the process of writing and updating it should be easy and quick.
I have to learn how to make secure backup without actually ruining the current data.

That’s it for now. See you another day. Will present you my updated website soon.

— Ankit Upadhyay

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