Doesn’t Wordpress get up your goat? Do you also find it too bulky for a simple blog, yet too simple for a complex website? Do you not feel it’s cheating, when you call yourself a web developer, and then use someone else’s work to display your own? The solution? Use Jekyll.

Jekyll allows you to build up a static, HTML blog, with minimal effort, though, unlike Wordpress, you’re left on your own with the code. No fancy UI, no magic plugin to drag and drop. No cheating.

Having drawn up the minimalist design on Sketch, I set to work, building the layouts, included HTML snippets, and CSS to style the website.

The results worked fairly well, if I may say so myself. The site uses scripts from FlowType.JS to make the typography look good, a teeny bit of Bootstrap (just the grid system), to make the footer work, and of course Font Awesome, for the icons. The cookie law compliance bar at the top is by Prime Box, which is ironic since it sets one of the only two cookies used on the site (the other is for CloudFlare.

If you’re interested, the font for the main body is Montserrat, and the site title, footer and meta is Inconsolata.

The colour scheming helped. The site title is straight black (#000), H1s are slightly more grey (#111), and the main body grey (#333). The accent colour, for icons, links and the footer is a nice blue (#477DCA). In the footer, the text is white (#FFF), with a 40% opacity (rgba(255,255,255,0.4)), and links of 100% opacity.