Building My First Website: Homer's Odyssey
Published on: May 25, 2025
It hasn’t been an easy ride to build this website—especially with my lack of web development experience. But I can confidently say I’ve learned a ton about the tools and technologies powering this site, and I’m here to share the messy journey.
Why GitHub Pages and 11ty?
My goal was to host this site on GitHub Pages, which meant sticking to static site generators. After seeing another developer struggle with self-hosting due to their non-static tech stack, I knew I needed a simpler path. Enter 11ty.
At first, I thought 11ty’s templates would make this a walk in the park. Spoiler: it wasn’t. When I opened the default template in VS Code, I froze—so many files, so much code, and zero idea where to start. I tinkered with minor tweaks, but the rigid structure stifled my design creativity.
So, I did the only logical thing: scrapped the template entirely and started from scratch.
Baby Steps and Breakthroughs
Armed with basic HTML/CSS knowledge from a web dev course I’d taken the previous semester, I dove into 11ty’s documentation. Progress was slow, but every tiny victory kept me going—whether it was fixing a rage-inducing bug after two hours of Googling or finally understanding how layouts worked.
Eventually, I circled back to the template I’d abandoned earlier—this time, not to copy it, but to borrow inspiration for my own design. I embraced 11ty’s layout system to structure pages consistently, and things started falling into place.
The To-Do List Grind
Once the skeleton of the site was built, I drafted a checklist of everything needed for launch: optimizing code, adding comments I’d lazily skipped, and experimenting with Nunjucks templating (a short-lived attempt—it’s still on my bucket list).
The Final Stretch
Two hours. That’s how long I spent agonizing over the perfect color scheme (you better appreciate that palette). After endless tweaks, the site was finally “presentable”—or at least, not embarrassing.
Thanks for reading! If you spot any typos… no you didn’t.
Stay tuned for more posts as I stumble through new projects.