May 12, 2021

Hao.is 2.0 | Revamped

Much like Verdansk, I’ve nuked everything and brought back a revamped 80s. You probably wouldn’t understand that reference unless you play Call of Duty: Warzone.

The Logo

The original logo was something I threw together in less than an hour. I overlaid 3 text colors and slapped on my self-proclamation. Somehow, I ran with the design for over a year.

original logo

The new logo design retained the original colors; hot pink, and baby blue. The colors represent pink sunsets and exotic blue waters. Easily two of my favorite things that I travel for. I’ve combined that with my love for the 80s; 80s cars, music, and culture. That and I’ve really been into “outrun” art and synth-wave music lately.

hao is new logo
new logo

The Website

The original blog was also pieced together while picking up the bits and pieces of WordPress that I hadn’t touched for years. You could say everything was held together with bubble gum and shoestrings.

I used multiple website builders to try to make my site work. They did fine for the past year but my site speed was a huge issue. Slow speed performance hurt your ranking with Google. Speed kills and that was enough of a reason for a change.

Gone are the templates and bloated website builders that occasionally dropped my site performance score to lower than a 15 on web.dev.

In its place is Oxygenbuilder. A lightweight builder that does not eat up resources loading nonessentials. From what I read, a lot of the backend code is cleaned up as well. There are no templates, you pretty much build your site from the ground up. Oxygen builder does have premade modules you can load in but it’s much more compact than everything available in the plugin store.

There was a bigger learning curve to Oxygenbuilder when comparing to other page builders. However, it wasn’t anything a Google or Youtube search couldn’t fix.

My new revamped site speed has improved over 5x after the switch! That’s a massive improvement. 5x of anything is a ? to the ?.

Yes, the speed has improved, however, I’m sure there’s much more to improve. As a non-web developer, I’m proud of how far I’ve come along. My code is probably still shit but at least I’m learning!

Thoughts

Oxygen builder wasn’t cheap either. I believe it cost me around $170 to purchase. It’s totally worth it if you plan on building websites for a living. I, myself, own quite a few sites so it was well worth the cost especially considering it was an unlimited site, lifetime license.

I’m really loving this new revamped look. It speaks much more to me as compared to the old design. I’m not sure if this 80s trend is making a full comeback or if it’s just a fad. I’m hoping it makes a full comeback, otherwise, my new brand new website will look even more dated.

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