This marks the beginning of a new site design for ixeous.net. This site is transitioning to a CMS. Until now, I’ve been hesitant to take on the additional overhead. Regardless of the CMS system used, they simply are not as fast, compact, clean, or pure as HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. can be. It’s going to take some time to get things setup and arranged just so, but it’s something that is probably long overdue.
Why make the change at all? Well, why not? CMSes offer some nice features regarding responsiveness, themes, plugins, etc. All of those things could be coded, but how much work is involved with recreating functionality that already exists? And how much effort is needed to refresh the site?
There is a part of me that is still wants to return the the clean, concise code that is simple, straight-forward, and fast. But it seems that for most people, fast just isn’t that important. A site loading in 1.28 seconds or 2.7 seconds isn’t really going to make that big of a difference. MachMetrics reports that average load times in the US are generally in the 8-10 second range.
I have run into some nuisances that seem more difficult to work around than they should be. Getting things to look or behave just right makes me wonder if to going back to simple code would be better. I realize, however, that nobody who looks at the site will really care about those things.
I may at some point return to writing the code myself, but, for now, I want to give this a fair shake and see how things go. I hope that this whole adventure ends up with a nicer site that is more engaging and a more pleasant experience.