Going live on a custom domain

An update on how the personal website revamp is going, with Claude Code as my agent and CodeYam. This is the original site I built a while ago, I believe using Vercel's v0 tool, and now there is a new site. There is a small trick here, and it is very much a work in progress, but the two are actually at different domains.

You can launch sites at fairly generic URLs pretty easily using different tools. Vercel or GitHub Pages are both tools you can use to do what is called hosting your page, so the content of your site is on the internet and lives there. A lot of the time, though, you want a custom domain.

I have two domains, and I had been using the full-name one as my main. I have not changed that over yet, so I have been iterating on the experimental one that I never really drive traffic to, and using it to test the new site. You could do this on a generic domain as well. I just happened to have my own, so that is what we are playing with.

There has been a ton of iteration through the design marks and the build, adding new photos and reworking the text. I still find that AI agents are really not good at writing text in a human voice. They can help with editing, and they can definitely cut things down and tighten them up, but I prefer to use my own language a lot of the time.

As is often the case when you are building something new, you get excited and want to add functionality. I wanted a form, so that my email is not exposed publicly but people can still get in touch by dropping a note. I wired it up through a tool called Stripe Projects, which recommended another tool called Customer.io that allows emails to be sent through a form. I am using free tiers throughout, since this is a personal website and a hobby project.

Even when you do your best to test or QA your site, there are things you want to change. The positioning of some photos, the fidelity, the length of some of the text, and how it looks on a mobile device. Mobile is something I probably should have checked more carefully while building, because a lot of text gets quite long on a phone.

The other thing I will be working on, and will share an update on rather than record end to end, is cutting the main domain over to the new site once I am happy with it. There are different ways to do it, and you can have either one redirect, so I will work through a plan with Cloudflare that I am happy with.