Finishing Touches

Hooray! The personal website is done. Well, I had technically finished it near the end of November (it had all the essential parts of being a website and looked polished enough), but now it definitely feels complete with its added features and final polish. This is my first official (second deployed) web application!

In life, everything is a journey. My path to completing this website was definitely challenging but also extremely enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of planning the layout and features that would be in the website, searching for inspiration from others before me, implementing those features in my mind, and then smoothing out any bumps or bugs by investigating my way to the root of the problem.

I also learned some lessons along the way. I discovered that, in web development (but also in other fields of software development, I'm sure), implementing a feature is easy enough; the main concern is whether that feature would work well with the code you've already written and whether it looks as visually pleasing as you imagined.

You'd think, for example, a navigation bar that becomes transparent (depending on whether it is on top of a background image) would be a pretty simply thing to apply to your website. BUT NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUI-- I mean, you may not anticipate, however, that a transparent nav bar may be problematic on a page with no background image (even more so if the page's background is white, and your nav bar's font is white!). Of course, this has definitely not happened to me, oh no. I would never forget to consider such an obvious issue! I'm just... repeating what I heard from a friend, is all! (Just kidding)

In all seriousness, though, there's nothing quite like finally arriving at a solution to those unforeseen problems. Some issues are resolved pretty easily, but there are also ones for which you really have to channel your inner Sherlock Holmes. For the aforementioned predicament, I implemented some quick fixes which seemed to work but I found them ultimately unsatisfying due to some visual or unnecessary complexity issues. Then, I remembered that I have the nav bar be non-transparent when its scroll-top height is greater than or equal to the height of a background div (usually meant for background images). Using that information, I created an empty background div (with no height) on top of the problematic pages so that the nav bar's scroll height would always be greater than or equal to the background div's height and thus be non-transparent all throughout the page. Just like that, my troubles were over. I'm sure, however, that there can be further improvements to my solution to make things more efficient, and I will definitely continue to look into how I can streamline my code.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have finished the personal website. There were many bumps on the road during this project and I had to take occasional breaks from this project, but I'm glad I persevered through and saw my work to completion. Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm completely done with my website and will never touch it again; I aim to continually improve it as my skills increase. This post simply marks the point in time where I'm proud to show this personal website to the public.

Now, for the future: I have a couple of other project ideas in mind, so I'll have things to keep me entertained while I go on with the process of application. It'll be yet another journey, but I meet it eagerly. I look forward to many more adventures in the future! Until then, Adios!