My Love Hate Relationship With Minimalism

When I moved from wordpress to static site like hugo I wanted to do it because it is minimal. But as my site grew to contain more and more stuff I am now thinking if it is right call to still keep my site minimal. I do like a minimal site and I think they are pretty. It is easier to make something pretty when you have very few things to play with. For example if your website is only on black and white there is no way to get it wrong, (don’t challenge me on that) but if you are planning to use multiple colors and not just one accent color it is very easy to mess things up and very difficult to make it perfect. As someone with almost no design skills thats what I feel. When I try to make someting minimal it almost always comes out pretty looking, but when I try to make something with lots of details it becomes harder. So shall I keep my site minimal or shall I bend towards little bit more “clutter”? There are few pages that get most of the traffic of my site. I can see this through my umami self hosted analytics. You can view this analytics here. So I think I need to find a way to showcase different sections of my site to those pages without it being too ugly.

Eastern vs Western Designs

Web design and design in general is very different in different parts of the world. There is two types of designs that I am aware of. Firstly the western ones, where the minimalism really shines. When people talk about “modern” web design they are talking about this most of the time. This type of design has lots of empty spaces, looks very organised and the user is directed to one information at a time.

On the other hand the eastern design is lot like the web 1.0 design. It does not look pretty (at least to my eyes) but it is functional and very information rich. A lot of government websites follow this design. Famously the SBI online banking webpage. Because it is very content rich it rarely looks pretty.

My love for both

I am influenced by both the eastern and western culture. There is a part of me that likes the ultra minimalist pretty websites but also when I find an website that is information rich without trying to “optimize” every little pixel and every little details, it fills me with joy. It feels something rebelious, someone who does not want to follow the guidelines and does what they wishes. This has some consequences. I would make a new theme for my website that would be minimal only showing absolutely necessary stuff. Then soon enough I start adding stuff to my site. May it be little bit more content or some external service. Then I would visit someone else’s website and it would be minimal and pretty. I would look at my site and think, wow this looks ugly, lets make a new theme. And the cycle starts all over again.

I do not think design of my site is ever going to be perfect. So I should stop trying to make it perfect. It is a personal webpage it does not need to be perfect. I do not stay on a same design for long, at max few months? The only site that had a design for 2-3 years was my old status (microblog) site. It has been merged to this site now. It is probably because I coded the whole thing by my hand and I had invested so much time that it felt wrong to change the theme frequently.

From Now On

In the age of AI it is easier than ever to redesign a website like this. Not too many files to modify. You can do it in few hours easily. But I should not do it. I should focus more or refining things and less on complete redesign. With little tweaks it will eventually become more of a my own creation than that of an AI. If that means the website will no longer be minimal, then let it be.. its my site anyway. I would always keep my website fast that much i can gurantee. (So no 1MB image files damn!)