Hey there,
I have been working on this website on and off since the middle of October if I recall right. It's still missing a contact page, and I didn't publish a blog post there yet but other than that feel free to attack my horrible design choices! 😅
Might be slow to load because I currently host this site under pythonanywhere's free tier until I can afford to upgrade my plan and buy a custom domain name. I have also identified other reasons for the slow first contact that I need to address soon, though SEO isn't a priority for me because I will primarily use this site to share my stuff.
Top comments (7)
Congrats on launching your website! Looks like the home page includes a heavy 4+ mb GIF animation. You mention you don't care for SEO but that affects your visitors for sure. On my (not so fast) internet connection the page took good 20 seconds to load. You may want to optimize this part. Cheers!
Any suggestions on how I could do that? I already compressed this gif as far as possible. Maybe a video format is better?
Edit: Or maybe I replace this with a static image? How do people feel about background videos in general?
I don't have much experience with that but I remember on one of the projects we indeed used an embed video for background animation. Also you may want to consider making it lower-res and scaling it with css. That should reduce the size even further.
Alright, thanks for the feedback! I think the best course of action is to use a static image for the moment until I can upgrade to a better plan, and then use a background video whose file size I will need to reduce as much as possible.
I like very much the general aesthetic of the page. My only advice would not be about the proper web design, that I find cool, but how you present yourself. I don't know if you want that page to be some kind of portfolio/cv, but usually it's not seen with good eyes to talk down to yourself.
Instead of "I'm not a professional developer" or "I have limited experience", it reads better "I'm looking forward an opportunity to grow as a developer" or "I'm still learning in this area".
That's my opinion. Have a nice day!
If you're on Chrome, you could use the Lighthouse Dev Tool to generate a report of your website. It will give pointers to which part you could improve on.
Update: Converted the background gif on my homepage to an mp4 file using ffmpeg which should improve the performance a little. My second bottleneck are all the imports I make but don't need everywhere. I will tackle this issue tomorrow.