0.029g per visit

Yesterday I made a bunch of improvements to practicalhugo.com.

For some reason I was using a super tight site wrapper, so the layout felt kinda puny, especially on on larger screens. So I switched to a wider wrapper and added a grid utility. Now the site feels more imposing; it fills the browser and I can create two-column layouts.

I also improved the footer and added the carbon footprint score, using data from Beacon. It’s currently rated amazing, producing around 0.029g per page visit. Not too bad.

I’ve been working on these design in Figma, which would usually come as no surprise. But, for personal projects I often jump straight into the browser and figure out the design on the go. I guess I have a pretty good idea already formed in my head of what I want to create, and there’s no client involvement other than myself, so it speeds up the process somewhat.

So what’s changed? Well it‘s much quicker to play around with ideas in Figma and get them out of my head before I forget. I also like the idea of keeping track of the design progression, visually, rather than relying entirely on a bunch of Git commits. Now the live site will coexist with the Figma designs. I’ll keep the Figma link public, so you can jump in and see what’s coming up any time you like.

Today I cleaned up a few things I forgot yesterday. I added a skip-link and improved the link hover effect. Maybe I’m going overboard with the whole background colour change on :hover. I use it for most my projects. I just love how basic it feels, so I keep coming back to it.