Back to the Roots

I gutted the site and launched version 7.0. Nothing massive changed, but I stripped out most of what was there—removed rubric experiments that never worked, deleted features nobody needed, added a comment system that doesn’t break. Cleaner palette, fewer sections, the whole thing tighter.

Web design teaches you something simple: you spend months building new things, and then you realize most of it’s just noise. So you delete it. You cut back to what actually functions. What functions is usually what you had to begin with, only now you understand it better.

Simplicity doesn’t happen by accident. It takes removing things to know what matters, and most things don’t. That’s the lesson you learn after redesigning the same site seven times.

The brilliant green is in the palette somewhere now, pulled from a band I was listening to when I started this. Details like that stick around because they made sense at the moment and survived the cuts. That’s the threshold—if it survives deletion, maybe it belongs.

The design doesn’t need to prove anything. It’s just a place to write. That’s enough.