--- layout: post title: Plaintext is Beautiful date: 2023-07-18T09:27:00Z tags: [webdev, text editor, development, gopher] --- Alternative title: Why does this website look so different? You might notice that the site looks a lot different than it did before.
If you're new, this is how it looked: ![A view of how the website previously looked](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/838048982873538572/1134865644014280856/image.png) For a lot of people, this may have been a lot more of a pleasing design than the current one. Shit, I still think that design has its merits, but it did have to change. I will explain why this was the case, and also why I went for this current design (which I hope isn't too bad!). ### Performance issues So, Chromium-based browsers offer a feature in their dev panel called [Lighthouse](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/). In effect, this is a tool that enables a developer to assess the quality of their website based on some important metrics (a11y, performance) and some not so important ones (like the dreaded SEO). I don't like using Google-related tools very much, but out of curiosity I did decide to check how my site was doing. Accessibility and (_shudder_) SEO were great, but to my surprise, the performance score was a disastrous 54 out of 100. To make matters worse, Lighthouse had calculated that my home page took on average **7 seconds** to load! This is really bad, especially since it was literally just a couple of pictures and some text, so I checked what its recommendations were and followed them. I managed to get the score up to around 70 or 80, but still the website felt really sluggish. It was at this point that I came to the realisation that my efforts to optimise the site in its current form were pointless, as the whole design was very bloated (with lots of images everywhere). Thankfully, I had come across some new communities at the time which helped provide inspiration for a new design! ### Smolnet, gopher and tildes If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I am a member of SDF, a public access Unix system. If you haven't, [do it now](/2023/07/11/enter-the-fediverse)!!!