nickd.org's Redesign: A Postmortem
Over here at Draft, we recently unveiled a new, revolutionary, ground-up rewrite of our personal site, nickd.org. This is our first rewrite in a few years.
In the following postmortem, we describe the factors that brought about a need for this rewrite, our methodology as we proceeded, and how it’s been received so far.
Why a rewrite?
The first question we’re frequently asked is: why rewrite nickd.org in the first place?
To be sure, nickd.org didn’t need to undertake such a major project. It was fine. It did its job. But over the years, we noticed that it was lagging in performance relative to some of its peers. Some of its mobile features ceased to work in long-tail QA tests. And the cost of maintenance simply grew too high. It was time to simplify.
Our process
First, we asked ourselves: who is nickd.org for? We researched extensively, understanding who nickd knows, who nickd works for, and what content has been on nickd.org since its founding in 1994.
We concluded that nickd.org is for literally the entire human race, and also most dogs.
Next, what content needs to be on nickd.org? Strictly speaking, a declaration of who nickd is, why nickd is so important, a link to their business, and maybe some contact information. After conferring with the client, we linked their assistant’s email address, instead.
Then, we went into design. What should this look like, visually speaking? We investigated the rest of the world, going on an extensive research process, and eventually concluded that the world is on fire and everything is in abject chaos. We settled on no design of any kind. A stylesheet was gently omitted, as were all webfonts. It took a long time to omit every single webfont, one by one.
Finally, JavaScript. Should any trackers be included? Any sort of dynamic functionality? Features of any kind? These would distract from the important message of nickd.org, so: no.
Post-launch adaptations
Build went pretty smoothly, considering the entire site was 10 lines of code. We added a single meta tag to adapt the site to mobile devices. The favicon was retained, for some baffling reason. Nothing else was included.
After launch, and at the gentle behest of others, we added title attributes to each link, in order to make the site fully WCAG 2.1 compliant. In them, we describe Basil, nickd’s perfect dog.
Post-mortem
Our redesign of nickd.org was a success. Page weight is less than 6KB, we score a perfect 100 on Google’s bad vanity metric, and people keep emailing us asking where the stylesheet is. There isn’t one and god is dead.