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Lessons learned from redesigning my website

Dan Vega on May 17, 2020

A couple of months ago I decided it was time to update https://www.danvega.dev. I normally get this feeling every couple of years but this time it ...
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Charith

amazing simple and unique I love it, but as a UI designer, I feel like you could've worked on a few things more.

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Dan Vega

That is part of the reason I am putting this out there Charith. I love to learn so if you have any constructive feedback please let me know so I can work on it 👍

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Charith

You have made the site super fast, that's great. It's loading faster than my SDD.

In terms of content, I think you have to give more prominent to big headlines and provide more clarity to the user to engage with your content more. Also, I think instead of focusing on a more detailed copy, you can shorten it to get higher conversions.

// visually, it has less contrast, a little bit of white space which makes content heavier and increases the cognitive load of the screen.

// rest of it has to do with the simple design principles, contrast, balance, visual hierarchy, typography, and clear space.

This is what I thought and your website is super fast and cool. Congratulations.

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Dan Vega

These are some great suggestions. I need to sit down when I have some time and think about them but I appreciate the feedback.

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Charith

I can surely help you, hit me up with a zoom link, we'll chat. we can do a value exchange if you like.

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Uchena Miller

I am currently in the process of redesigning my personal website and this is one of the articles that is going to help. I really appreciate this dev post and Im sure others do; it is enlightening. But in order to gain my own experience I have to do this for my self to truly understand these lessons, however, im quite familiar with the HTML and CSS standards regarding layouts. Im a junior in the field with just about 6 months worth of experience so i try to do everything from scratch (the long way) instead of using frameworks to just be knowledgeable enough before i start diving in to CSS and JS frameworks and i think that's a pretty good idea.

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Dan Vega

Let me know when you launch that redesign and I will share it with my audience. If you have any issues that come up please let me know and I will do my best to help. Working on personal projects is a great way to learn and I hope you have some fun in the process. Good luck with the redesign!

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Uchena Miller

Thanks much, Ill surely do.

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Shubham Kamath

I want to update my website, rather I want to clean it up and surely this would help me. Thanks!

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This Dot Media

Love this Dan 😄 Thanks for sharing your process with us. Your website looks great! Clean, simple, and really easy to navigate

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Dan Vega

Thank you!

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This Dot Media

NP!

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Drew Town

For the images you could try using the new loading="lazy" attribute. With support in chrome and Firefox it might get you most of the way there.

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Dan Vega

I actually have that on the img tag but it's not working. I think it has something to do with the way I am pulling the images from GraphQL but I'm not really sure, to be honest.

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Albert Wiersch • Edited

Very nice.... clean and super-fast unlike so many bloated sites these days. Dark mode is a great addition as I often prefer and use dark mode. I gave it a quick check with CSS HTML Validator and it did find some underlying HTML issues though... so you may want to address the HTML/CSS syntax issues.

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Waylon Walker

Thanks for sharing your story. Your site looks very nice 👌

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Dan Vega

Thank you for the kind words, Waylon!