It’s true! I present to you: A new look. Fresh and not-entirely-ugly (at least in my eyes, but let’s see for how long this feeling remains).

“Why a new website?”, you ask? Let me explain.

Before today, I had a single-page website with images of my projects, accessible via the address lisacharlotterost.de. I built it with plain HTML & CSS a few years back. It looked like this:

On another address – lisacharlotterost.github.io – I had hosted a blog with Github Pages and the static site generator Jekyll since November 2014. It looked like this:

So I had two websites, a portfolio and a blog.

And this wasn’t a satisfying situation. Here are the main reasons:

• I didn’t want to confuse people with two URLs & two looks of two websites.
• The address “lisacharlotterost.github.io” doesn’t look awesome, anyway.
• I had started writing dozens of blog posts at my new job at Datawrapper and wanted to integrate these external articles without reposting. My old blog had a single-page layout, and so I would have needed to create big links…unsatisfying, unsatisfying indeed. I wanted a better solution.
• In general, my website didn’t represent anymore what I do: lisacharlotterost.de was full of design projects, but not with blog posts. That made sense when my blog was just a hobby and design was what I identified with. But that changed: Writing is what I’ve been doing most of my time since starting at Datawrapper. It has become my main work. And I wanted to show my work.
• After blogging for a few years, I had written an unskimable number of blog posts. I wanted to give people a chance to quickly see my “best-of”. A nice by-product: In the old layout, new articles would have “pushed away” the good stuff. Which made me not want to write new, short, less-good articles. Having a best-of means I don’t need to worry about that.
• My blog was built on top of two forked Jekyll themes and I had four giant CSS files and no overview over what they were doing. I felt like I didn’t “own” the code.

Also, I’m a designer at heart…and we have this notorious thing that we’re always unhappy with our portfolio sites and constantly need to redesign them.

So I did.

During the last few (well, eight) months, with big breaks and in tiny sessions, I solved all my issues with the former set-up. I built a Jekyll Github page from scratch, I learned a lot, and now I’m happy.

Thanks to Jonathan Muth for his help with building the website – especially the super-custom home-baked cookie warning couldn’t have happened without him. (I’ve never been happier to see a cookie warning.)

That’s it! If you’re interested in learning about the code & want to help me improve it, find the code on Github. I’ll be very, very grateful. And like always, you’ll find me on Twitter or via email: lisacharlotterost@gmail.com.