I’ve had a personal website for a long time. I think since about 2013, back then on stijn-bakker.nl.

Look it up in the Wayback machine if you like.

It started as a personal portfolio. Later it became like a static business card. Later still it mostly served as a domain for my email. Now I’ve decided to really pick it up again.

But I faced a choice: to build or not to build?

Over the years my site has lived as PHP, raw HTML+CSS, WordPress, SquareSpace, back to WordPress, NextJS, then back to WordPress, then to SvelteKit.

It’s always been a bit of an afterthought.

So, what to do now. Should I go with an elegant builder like SquareSpace, with nice looking publishing features? Or, go with SvelteKit? Takes a bit more work to setup, but is also a lot quicker (and cheaper) when deployed as a static site.

Ultimately I settled on the latter. SvelteKit.

Because I’m fairly quick at building nice designs.

I also like coding, and having the option of doing experiments.

And I also dislike coding enough to force myself to keep my website really really simple.

I’ve set up a SvelteKit project with some basic components, and markdown integration. That allows me to have a very user-friendly writing experience (instead of coding raw HTML). The site builds to HTML, which I can be pretty sure to be long-term compatible (even if SvelteKit itself were/is to become ancient technology).

At any point I can take a .zip of my website and move somewhere else.

That feels nice.

And that also means I can treat my site now as my little public garden. A space for myself to put things I find interesting. Write little essays. Share my photography. And act as a simple business card.

Also, it can act as a platform for me to do (code) experiments.

I can build landing pages for ideas I come up with. Experiment with stuff like interactive articles. Or build something like a mini-fully-interactive-recipe-cookbook (as reference for myself and to share with the world).

Sum up; I chose to build my own site; it’s cheaper, more extendible, long-term file-compatible, and allows me to accumulate content over time.