I have always enjoyed building websites, crafting the html, css and minimal javascript, so of course I applied all my expertise and enjoyment into my own site!

My guiding principles:

• responsive, mobile-first
• accessible by leveraging semantic html
• fast, with minimal javascript
• secure, with minimal server requests

To achieve this, I built a light php framework with templates for the front-end, and a reusable component framework for the back-end. Whenever a page is requested, this server-side framework builts the page on the fly if it was not generated before, or it will rebuild the page if some of its parts changed. So the build step is combined with rendering, which probably sounds sub-optimal, but works really well when prototyping and experimenting with building a site.

And then I added a capability to convert the php-based site into a static site, and that static version is what I publish as my site. And this consists just of static html files that use 1 css file and 1 javascript file, and so that's really fast, and the browser will cache the css and javascript.