dignuz

Five moves later, my website is back to the simplest thing there is

  1. The first one was an HTML template I did not write.
  2. Then WordPress.
  3. Then WordPress with a page builder bolted on top.
  4. Then Webflow.
  5. Then Eleventy.
  6. Now Astro, which builds the site and hands back plain HTML.

I redesigned it at nearly every stop, which is a separate confession.

None of that is indecision. Every one of those moves was a real migration: my content, my URLs, my mistakes. It is why I can tell you what leaving a platform costs instead of guessing.

Dimitri photographed in black and white against a dark background, arms folded, close-cropped hair and a short beard, in a plain dark t-shirt with a braided band on one wrist, smiling at the camera

01

How I got here

Dimitri, a software engineer in Tartu.

  1. Business software

    I studied theoretical physics here, and in 2002 I started writing business software instead. The kind a company runs its working day on, where a bug means somebody cannot invoice a customer that afternoon.

    Seven years of that teaches you software is judged on whether it keeps working, not on how it looks the day it ships.

  2. On my own, then websites

    In 2009 I went out on my own. By 2012 the work was websites, and for four years that meant WordPress: building the sites, customising the themes, running the hosting.

    That is where I learned what a site costs to own rather than to build. It is a different number, and it is the one nobody quotes you.

  3. Projects, and a team of fifteen

    Then four years running projects and managing a team of fifteen.

    The hard part was never the software. It was deciding what gets built, telling someone their idea is expensive, and keeping a promise made three months earlier.

  4. The modern web

    Since then it has been the modern web and the infrastructure under it, which is the stretch the top of this page was about.

02

What I work with

Each group starts with what I use now and ends where I started.

  • Front of the site

    Now Astro, SvelteKit, TypeScript, Tailwind, GSAP

    The pages are assembled before anyone visits them, so there is nothing to patch at midnight and nothing to slow the page down.

    Further back HTML and CSS, Webflow (certified developer), WordPress themes and Elementor, and at the very beginning Flash and ActionScript

  • Behind it

    Now TypeScript, NestJS, Convex, Sanity, Supabase

    Where a tool keeps its data and decides who is allowed to see what.

    Further back C#, .NET, Blazor, WinForms, DevExpress and MS SQL, which is where I started in 2002

  • Cloud and hosting

    Now Netlify, Cloudflare, Docker, Azure Aspire, Azure Bicep

    Most websites need the first two and none of the rest. When a project needs the rest, it is not new ground.

  • Pipelines and tests

    Now CI/CD, Vitest, Playwright

    The tests run before every release, so a broken link stops it instead of reaching you.

    Further back TeamCity and MSBuild

  • SEO

    Now Technical SEO and crawlability, structured data, Search Console

    Whether search engines and AI answers can read a site at all, which is a different question from whether it ranks.

Not all of it is for sale here. It is what I know, and on a custom build it is the difference between one way of doing it and a choice.

If it sounds like I could help

Tell me what is going wrong with your site, or what you are trying to build. I will tell you whether I am the right person for it.

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