For quite a while now, my personal website was made with google sites. It served its purpose well, but I wanted to create something that better showcased my skills.
After some research, I landed on Astro as the framework for building this site. Since it is a static site generator, I could easily host it using Cloudflare Pages for free. Additionally, the ability to use markdown files for content made it easy to create and manage pages. I became comfortable with plain HTML and CSS when I updated the Auburn AICHE website, but this also taught me the difficulties maintaining page consistency and styling without a framework. Astro’s component-based architecture and large ecosystem of pre-built components made it easy to find a template and customize it to my liking.
Being new to serverless hosting, I had a few stumbles along the way. I first started with an example Astro template from Cloudflare, but it was configured to use workers for server-side rendering. This was unnecessary for my use case and caused some problems when attempting to configure the site. After realizing this, I switched from Workers to Pages, which simplified the deployment process significantly.
I started with the free Case template. The template is geared towards developers, so it took some work to transition it to a portfolio site. The projects structure that ships with the template was built for showcasing professional work, so I adapted it to highlight personal projects instead. Thankfully, the components for the writing section were easy to repurpose.
If you want to dive deeper, feel free to check out the archives of this website (2025 and prior) and the Auburn AICHE (2019 and prior) website from before my updates.