The WordPress Days
Back in September 2016, I built my first proper portfolio site. WordPress. You know, the thing that powers half the internet. It made sense at the time – I wanted something that worked out of the box, with plugins handling the heavy lifting.
What I Threw at It
So I grabbed the StanleyWP theme, which looked professional enough for a music/portfolio site. Then came the plugin circus:
- Responsive Filterable Portfolio – Click categories, filter projects, watch them rearrange themselves. Cool.
- Portfolio Gallery – High-end lightbox effects for showing off media. Zooms, overlays, the works.
- Social Icons – Because apparently I needed to link to my social profiles in exactly 47 places.
- Autoptimize – Minifying CSS and JavaScript so the site doesn’t feel like watching paint dry.
- Cloudflare – CDN magic to make sure the site loads fast no matter where you’re accessing it from.
Then there’s the usual suspects: jQuery for interactivity, Font Awesome and Glyphicons for icons, the whole ensemble cast of web frameworks from 2016.
The Reality
Did it work? Yeah, it worked. Was it elegant? Not particularly. It felt like stacking plugins on top of each other and praying nothing conflicts. Update one, something breaks in another. Add a feature, load time creeps up. It’s the classic WordPress experience – incredibly functional, vaguely chaotic.
The site was mobile-responsive, looked decent on all devices, and did exactly what you’d expect a portfolio site to do. Show projects. Look professional. Don’t crash.
Three Years In
From late 2016 through mid-2019, this site did its job. It showcased music production work, creative projects, all that good stuff. The plugins handled filtering, galleries, social integration. Autoptimize kept things reasonably snappy. Cloudflare made sure nobody on the other side of the world waited forever for assets to load.
But after a few years of maintaining it, dealing with plugin updates, occasionally fixing mysterious breakages caused by who-knows-what – I started thinking there had to be a better way.
The Plan B (Which Became Plan A)
By mid-2019, I knew what I wanted to build. A static site. Custom modules. Full control. No plugin roulette. So I rebuilt everything in Jekyll, and honestly? Best decision ever.
But hey, v1 got the job done. It proved the concept. It helped establish Adam Adams Music as a thing. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need – a working solution that lets you figure out what you actually want before you rebuild it properly.