Alright folks, today’s mess I’m chronicling? Trying to build something like that Seb Jones fella does. Looked simple enough on the surface, right? Famous last words.
Just Diving In Blind
Fired up my machine, stupidly thinking I’d have it knocked out before lunch. Figured, hey, it’s basically a landing page with some grids and links. How hard could it be? Grabbed a coffee feeling all confident.
Where It All Started Screwing Up
Started chucking HTML together. Easy peasy. Added some basic CSS, flexbox stuff for the layout. Then came the headaches.
- Font Nightmare: Wanted that clean, slightly chunky font he uses. Searched forever. Downloaded a couple, tried Google Fonts. Nothing looked exactly right. Settled on something kinda close after an hour of squinting.
- Image Sizes: His pictures look crisp but load fast. Mine? Bloated file sizes making it crawl. Spent ages resizing, compressing, testing. Got thumbnails fuzzy then sharp, load times slow then tolerable.
- Navbar Agony: Wanted that smooth hover effect. Wasted another lifetime fiddling with opacity, transitions, CSS pseudo-classes. Made it kind of work, but it feels jerky.
The Unexpected Pit
Thought the hard part was over. Hah. Went to make it work decently on my phone. Absolute disaster. Stuff overflowing everywhere. Layout completely collapsed. Spent the next two hours drowning in media queries. Tiny screen, medium screen… why so many breakpoints?! Nearly threw the phone against the wall.
Janky Results & Resignation
Lost track of time completely. Neck hurting, eyes glazed over. Finally got something that wasn’t completely embarrassing on most devices. Is it pixel-perfect like Seb Jones? Hell no. Does it look passably similar if you squint? Maybe. Functionally, it works. But man… the sweat equity.
Finished around 7 PM. Cold coffee beside me. Looked at the final thing – feels slightly off, can’t put my finger on why. Probably some alignment thing. Too tired to care anymore. The takeaway? What looks simple online hides miles of grunt work and frustration. Next time? Maybe I’ll just admire his work from afar.
