This site had been sitting on the same WordPress build for six years. Six years of the same theme, the same plugins quietly asking for updates, the same layout I stopped really looking at because I was too close to it. It worked, technically. But “it works” is a low bar for something with my name on it, and I run a web design business. At some point the cobbler’s shoes had to get fixed.
So over the last few weeks I pulled the whole thing apart and rebuilt it as a static site with Astro, and moved to a bold, brutalist design language: heavy black borders, offset drop shadows, big flat colour blocks, no soft gradients pretending to be depth. It’s the opposite of the safe, rounded-corner template look most personal sites default to, and that was the point. I wanted something that actually looked like me rather than like every other “web guy with a blog” site.
Why WordPress had to go
WordPress served me well for a long time, and I still build client sites on it through Metserve Media. But for a personal site with a handful of pages and a blog, it was overkill. Every plugin update was a small gamble. Every theme tweak meant fighting a page builder instead of just writing HTML and CSS. And the performance overhead of a full PHP stack and a database for what’s essentially a resume, a blog and a contact form never made sense once I actually sat down and thought about it properly.
Astro flips that. The site builds down to plain HTML, CSS and a sliver of JavaScript, hosted as static files. No database to back up, no admin panel to secure, no plugin conflicts at 11pm. New content is a markdown file with some frontmatter at the top. Commit it, push it, and GitHub Actions builds and deploys the whole site automatically. It’s the kind of workflow that suits someone who’d rather spend an evening writing than fighting a CMS.
What actually changed
Visually, almost everything. The homepage opens with a big, blunt headline (Father. Entrepreneur. Geek.) instead of a soft introduction, next to a tilted polaroid-style photo rather than a stock hero image. There’s a scrolling marquee ticker, sharp-edged cards for the ventures I run, and a timeline of the milestones that actually mattered (first website in 1995, joining the Met in 2002, CCTV Aware in 2014, going all-in as a founder in 2016). The testimonials are real ones from real clients, not filler copy.
Underneath the new coat of paint, the bones changed too. All eleven existing blog posts moved across with their original URLs intact, so nothing that was already indexed or bookmarked broke. The contact form still works, it just posts through a service that respects the site’s security headers instead of the old plugin-based approach. RSS and the sitemap are both still there, just generated at build time rather than on every page load.
Why now, and why like this
Honestly, six years is too long to let a website sit untouched, especially one that’s meant to represent what I actually do for a living. I kept telling clients to modernise, to simplify, to stop paying for complexity they didn’t need, while my own site quietly ignored all of that advice. The brutalist direction was a deliberate overcorrection: after years of building safe, client-friendly, inoffensive sites, I wanted my own corner of the internet to have some attitude.
It’s live now. If you spot something broken, that’s what the contact form is for.