Starting Anew
Tags: html, css, devjournal, blog
Published: 2020-05-18 00:37:01

## Let’s try this again

Wow, I’m back…again. 

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post, yet it’s been on my mind for some time. To be honest, I feel like my journey has been on pause for a while…for no fault other than my own discipline running dry and I stopped looking to code as much as I was.

But you know what never left? The guilt that I /wasn’t/ coding. I think it’s because I knew that I should be developing my skills and working towards that web developer job but I just kind of stopped.

Regardless, I wanted/needed to get back into it. The fact that my itch to become a Web Developer hasn’t left is a huge sign to me that it’s truly my passion. In my absence I still read about it, still watched videos about it, and still did some coding here and there - I even created my future wedding website!

![Homepage of furrever.wedding](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/1678rqrhzhhncj41fa03.png)

## Onto the building from scratch…
You may have seen my last post, [Simple Ways To Build Your Own Blog](https://dev.to/ryan_furrer/simple-ways-to-build-your-own-blog-4j9m), in which I built a blog using [Stackbit](https://www.stackbit.com/). That was quick and easy and works really well! However, then I stopped writing, again. So as time went on and my itch for writing came back I couldn’t get the idea out of my head to create my own blog site from scratch…so here we are!

With the idea of starting anew I wanted to create something clean, simple, modern, and performant - this is also how I want to treat my dive back into my journey. I wanted to simplify my design ideas and color palette as well. I see a lot of minimal websites and love the look and feel, so that’s where I started.

So what did I use to build the site? Good old HTML and CSS - There’s nothing much more minimal than those! I’ll likely implement some light JS in the future but there’s no need to bog the site down unnecessarily.

Technologies out of the way, I wanted to pick a color palette and I used [Coolors](https://coolors.co/) to help me out. The “Tea Green” `#C2EABD` and “Oxford Blue” `#011936` were paired together and I loved them right away…to be honest they give me some [Game Boy Color Palettes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes) vibes. From there I made a couple of edits and used just 5 colors across both dark and light themes.

![Coding Catchup's dark theme palette](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/oljzudsgq9f28anja31x.png)

![Coding Catchup's light theme palette](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/4s82a6rx11ypk540q5e2.png)

Color palette and technologies decided, it was time to get going on this build!

## Building, Styling, and Finalizing
Building the blog didn’t take long at all - it’s dead simple, after all. I started with the homepage, followed by the about page, then the blogs page. That’s it, just 3 pages! 

Keeping the simple and clean approach in mind, it really made creating the layout quite easy. There’s nothing new or special to my site, but it’s built and designed how I like it, hopefully you’ll all like it as well!

Throughout the building process I had little styling ideas here and there to make the site a little less plain, but again, it’s a pretty simple design and site. No frills and a bigger focus on the content.

I tested the site on multiple different browsers including Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox on both my 2012 MacBook Air and my desktop PC using 27” 4k monitors. I also tested it on several mobile devices including iPhone 6s, iPhone XS, iPhone 11 Pro Max, and a Samsung A50. Keeping it simple made responsiveness simple, a nice perk!

I also used a slightly modified version of Andy Bell’s [CSS Reset](https://hankchizljaw.com/wrote/a-modern-css-reset/). I’ve mentioned this before but it’s just a solid little file that makes building pages so much nicer.

## Future Improvements
Moving forward I have just a few ideas to bring more to Coding Catchup. Those things include:

* An actual logo
* Theme toggle
* Email subscription form
* Implementing a CMS

And that’s it! Thanks for reading my foray back into blogging (again) and re-igniting the journey to my first Web Developer job. Feel free to check out [Coding Catchup](https://www.codingcatchup.com/) and let me know what you think! 

### Link Dump:
* [Simple Ways To Build Your Own Blog](https://dev.to/ryan_furrer/simple-ways-to-build-your-own-blog-4j9m)
* [Stackbit](https://www.stackbit.com/)
* [Coolors](https://coolors.co/)
* [Game Boy Color Palettes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes)
* Andy Bell’s [CSS Reset](https://hankchizljaw.com/wrote/a-modern-css-reset/)
* [Coding Catchup](https://www.codingcatchup.com/)