Making this site

I needed a second article to test some of my layouts so thought I would just give a quick overview of how I built this site and some of my thoughts for it's future. If you have any specific questions or want more detail on anything just let me know.

The site is built on HTML and CSS just like all other websites. How that's created can vary greatly and for this site I've used PHP to create templates and have pages created from JSON files that store the various content. It isn't built on a content management system (CMS) yet which means I manually create and edit various documents. In the longer term I will probably combine this with a CMS I have been working on for clients but for now I wanted to keep things fairly simple and get the site up rather than delaying it adding extra features.

The site design isn't mine and comes from a template, again just to save some time. Personally I prefer to use a much more lightweight programming style and over time I will be tweaking the design to suit my own tastes better and starting the CSS from the ground up so I have a bit more control over things.

The interactive elements rely on JS which is something I'm working hard at improving for my job at the moment. In time I'll dig a little deeper in to some of that and re-write it in a way that suits me better so I can fully understand some of the more complex elements. I'll probably write at least some of that up as a bit of a tutorial style which will help me to learn it better. As with any of this if you do actually have an interest and want to know more about specific elements just let me know.