2024/Brighton/pains
Personal websites pain points was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024.
Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/pains
IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Session: Personal websites pain points
When: 2024-03-09 17:00
Participants
Ana Rodrigues
Mark Everitt
Murray- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Notes
Maggie wants to learn about people's pain points on their websites because they are working on building a digital garden tool.
It's hard to see what are the needs and how not to over-engineer this tool that would allow people to easily build their own digital garden.
But putting digital garden aside, figuring out what people have struggled when building their own website.
Mark built everything themselves and had to learn everything from scratch which is very time consuming. As a developer they want to keep control but things like build system aren't something they think people need to learn.
Dave is currently migrating their blog from a CMS to 11ty. As he gets asked often help to build websites, a starter pack that does it all would be helpful. Time is a constraint.
Paul built their own CMS. But a CMS that anyone could use which makes setting boundaries of what to build very complicated. (IndieKit)
Comments from how the 11ty community is incredibly helpful.
Ana made website decisions in the past that now they regret. Now if they add more content, it makes a future refactor a bigger nightmare. The site is 10 years old. Trying to evolve it into a digital garden has made it messy – the information architecture is overwhelming. Gets blocked on what to work on. Moving URLs and rearranging the structure seems too difficult.
Mark suggests that Ana's idea of "the ideal website" might change in another 10 years.
Some people have rebuilt their site from scratch and found the refactoring process was helpful to rethink the data structures and figure out what they needed from a website.
People like slugable/top level URLs but as pointed out it might not work for notes or bookmarks.
Exploring content of a website via tags and filters and not in a chronological way.
Todd's pain-point is styling their website. They used a lot of inline-styles and tried to fix it by removing it and re-add to css files.
People are wondering if there is some sort of schema or guide of things your personal website should have especially when it comes to URL structure.
Maggie asks: did you have a specific design session before building your own website?
Dave mentioned that he wrote down what type of posts they imagined to have on their website. The list ended up with 78. The goal was to have in a CMS the exact form fields expected for each type of posts.
Paul mentions the IndieWeb standard of post types and how it was a helpful start.
Ana brings up how they would like to post on their website from their phone and how Micropub is also a bit difficult to build some scratch to match the schema of their posts. More people expressed how they wished they could post on their blog from their phone.
Maggie says that one of their pain points is how the server side rendering that they currently use impacts animations.
One of Todd's pain-points is microformats and how their setup might have broken their webmentions.