My vision board was the first thing I made. It was a mock-up of how I wanted my homepage to look. I wanted a black page with a photo, the name, and a menu at the top. I wanted it to be lightweight and simple.I went looking for a WordPress theme meeting the following criteria:

• Fast
• Lightweight
• No unnecessary stylistic features
• “Old web” look

Vision Board

These criteria are inspired by the sites of the Web 1.0 days. Sites weren’t filled with animated menus and fancy scrolling graphics, no ridiculous colour palettes or JavaScript slowing everything down. Sites loaded fast and presented you with the necessary information. I’ve always been fond of this old-school ultra-minimalist take on web design, and I wanted to emulate it. I also found that most modern-day minimalist design is incredibly boring. Search Google Images for “minimalist website” and you’ll notice something: They all look the same. Everything has white backgrounds with a big, bold sans serif titles, along with a bright accent colour. This style sucks. There’s no character to it.

Visually, I wanted mine to be similar to a system console. This goes with the look of old-school internet/computing that I’m trying for. I found a theme that seems to fit my criteria, RetroGeek by tuxlog. I imported this theme into my website and began to modify it.

First, I changed the colour scheme to a black background with white text. I use dark mode for everything on all my devices, so I wanted my site to look like that by default. I removed the site header, search bar, and the ASCII art displayed by the theme. I found all of these created unnecessary clutter. I was really annoyed by the text at the bottom of my site that read “Proudly powered by WordPress”. Some themes will let you remove this text in the customization menu, but mine did not allow that.

To get around this, I followed this guide I found online. The first step was to download an FTP client to connect to my website. In my case, I used FileZilla. I logged into my website using the FTP client and navigated to the “footer.php” file. In this file, I could modify the text at the bottom, along with the link it directed you to. I changed it to redirect to my Instagram.

I used FileZilla further to modify some of the spacing on my homepage. Originally, there were these two white lines with an empty space in between them creating a lot of wasted area on the page. I managed to go into the website files and remove this whole section, making my homepage nothing more than the cover and a link to my Instagram.

Next, I set up the archive. I’m using this page to repost all the content from my Instagram, along with anything new posted there. My inspiration for this page was the portfolio of photographer Matthew Yoscary. I’ve always loved the design of his site. I like how straightforward it is, just images you scroll through. His site is not bogged down by unnecessary features. I also personally like the lack of search bar, I think it adds simplicity.

The blog page is simple, just a feed of posts. I eventually plan to make categories in the menu for different blog post tags so you can sort it if you like.

The latest thing I made was the “about” page. I also kept this simple. The “about” page serves a different purpose for different websites. If you’re a lawyer, it makes sense to tell people who you are, where you come from, what’s your education, etc. For my purposes, I don’t think it’s relevant. I think leaving very little is more intriguing than explaining my life story. Yoscary doesn’t have any sort of personal information on his site. He has a contact form, and that’s it. In his case, it’s more important that his work speaks for itself. This is why I choose not to include much in the “about” section. I also just think it’s really weird how people are so willing to put their personal information online. My parents told me not to use my real name on the internet when I was a kid, and I still think that’s a good idea.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve done so far to set up this hellscape of a website. Sit back and enjoy.