Designing and Building This Website
The site you're reading right now — a fast, content-driven personal site and portfolio platform, designed and built from scratch with Astro.
- Designed and built a fast, content-first personal site and portfolio platform with Astro
- Set up Markdown-based content collections so blog posts and portfolio projects can be added without touching code
- Implemented a bilingual EN/DE structure with hreflang tags and a full SEO layer (sitemap, Open Graph, JSON-LD)
- Built a small custom design system in plain CSS — no framework — for full control over look, feel, and performance
Context
A personal site needed to do more than list a CV — it had to present a decade of embedded systems and hardware work, host a blog, host small browser-based tools, and stay easy to extend without turning into a maintenance burden. This site — including the very portfolio system you’re browsing right now — is the result.
My Role
I planned, designed, and built the entire site myself: the content structure, the visual design system, the page templates, the SEO layer, and the small tools section. I also write and maintain the content (blog posts, project write-ups, translations).
Technical Challenge
The challenge was to keep three things in balance: a result that looks and feels considered, a codebase that stays easy to maintain and extend, and a site that is genuinely fast and search-engine friendly — without reaching for a heavy framework or CMS that would add complexity for a one-person site.
Solution
The site is built with Astro and Markdown-based content collections, so blog posts and portfolio
projects (this one included) are just Markdown files with a small, well-defined set of frontmatter
fields — no code changes required to publish new content. The visual design is a small custom
system in plain CSS with shared design tokens, the structure is bilingual (English/German) with
proper hreflang tags, and the site carries a full SEO layer: sitemap, Open Graph metadata, and
JSON-LD structured data.
Impact
The result is a site that loads quickly, is simple to keep up to date, and can grow — new blog posts, new portfolio projects, new tools — without ever needing a redesign or a framework migration.
Technologies
Astro, TypeScript, Markdown content collections, plain CSS design system, i18n (EN/DE), sitemap & JSON-LD/SEO tooling
Like what you see?
If the way this site looks, loads, and is put together appeals to you, that’s exactly the kind of work I take on for clients, too — from a clean concept through to a deployed, easy-to-maintain result. If you’d like a website that feels this considered, get in touch and let’s talk about what that could look like for you.
