Looking for Honest Feedback on My Personal Website

First, thank you so much for clicking on this post, much appreciated!

I've recently made a pretty big update to my personal website, at xtrp.io which is now at version 4.

I built it with my own MVC system written in PHP, and it would be great if I could get some constructive criticism and/or suggestions on it.

Here are a few things I've personally thought of that need improvement, which I am working on at the moment:

• Improve load speeds by switching to WebP for images, minifying CSS and JavaScript, etc.
• Add hero/background photo to homepage
• Make the résumé cleaner and add a download PDF link to the résumé
• Add loading screen for entire site so that images load better
• Add navbar menu button transition for mobile
• Add an "add to homescreen" prompt for mobile devices

Thanks again for helping out.

— Gabriel Romualdo, October 10, 2019

Note: I formerly wrote under my pseudonym, Fred Adams.

Comments

[YuanHao Chiang]

Website looks great, it's also really impressive to see what you have built considering your young age.

Do you have any plans or goals for the short/long term? Interested to know :) (I also started coding at a quite young age).

I did this when I was in my early 20's: wind-water.net

There's a small bug: when scrolling too quickly to the bottom, the viewport turns completely white in the bottom as if there were most posts but there are not. I tried it on MacOS so not sure if it will happen scrolling so fast in another OS.

[Gabriel Romualdo]

Thanks for the feedback, I will look into the scrolling problem. As for any plans or goals, I'm just going to keep coding and see where it goes :)

— Gabriel

[Michael Skweres]

Hi, So I have visited your website through Brave where I have by default blocked JS etc. and.. here's the result: vimeo.com/367550160

I like websites to be clean and your's is. I like them to get to the point and here is also checkmark. Although your sticky menu rely on JS and as you see before I allow it there has been a problem. Same with home page. No information about you, only strange generated avatar.. that's me. So I think it would be nice to set some information that JS must be enabled or.. maybe you will find some other solution.

As for avatar.. I know and used this generstor and it's nic but.. that's not "you". Put a picture or just ditch this element altogether. It's not you. It;s some (sorry for pure honesty) shitty generated image. Build your brand on you.. on yourself.

As for the content. I would increase the font size there to be easier and more pleasant to read. I also have recorded a slight change and.. to my mind at least it's way more pleasant :) vimeo.com/367551295

[Gabriel Romualdo]

Thanks for the feedback! I've fixed most of the issues with accessibility for no-JS users, and tested on the site on Brave with JS disabled. I will continue working on adding more no-JS support in the near future.

As for the content, the Vimeo link you provided seems to be broken. Could you try re-uploading or sending a video file to my email ([e-mail])?

Thanks for the feedback again, much appreciated.

— Gabriel

[Michael Skweres]

I have fixed the vimeo link :)

[Lautaro Lobo]

I really like your site Fred! The first bullet point that you listed is huge, it will improve UX and help you to rank better on Google. Also, I wouldn't add a loading screen, instead I would try to improve even more loading time and so of your website. Do you know about Google Speed Insights? Maybe is just me that I don't like loading screens. Anyways, your site is lovely!

[Gabriel Romualdo]

Thanks so much, Google Speed Insights is an amazing tool! Will be working on load speeds a lot as soon as I can.

— Gabriel

[Giorgos Kontopoulos 👀]

@xtrp it looks clean and did not see anything that would need changing

On a more stylistic view perhaps give it some more colours. Also if the purpose of the site is to get people to hire you make the resume button more prominent.

[Gabriel Romualdo]

Thanks for the feedback, will try and add more colors soon. Not really looking for work at all at the moment, but will make the résumé button more prominent when I do.

— Gabriel

[drew.tech]

Curios why you wrote your own MVC framework. Was it a learning exercise? That’s pretty cool.

[Gabriel Romualdo]

Yeah, it was mostly just me wanting to learn MVC by building my own framework for my own site, although I intend to use a real framework such as Laravel or Node in future projects because building my own has been pretty time-consuming.

— Gabriel

[tjlsmith]

youtube.com/watch?v=HCidSV7MfpQ