JB Enterprises - Johan Bezem

Interim Management & Consulting

New Site

In the course of 2017 I have revamped my site. The design hasn't changed much, except for the blog entries. In these few paragraphs I want to describe the changes and their rationale.

From its inception in 1999 until 2008, my website was a hand-coded set of HTML files, later enhanced with some simple CSS. Over the years I started using XHTML, verifying the standards' compliance, and regularly updated the contents as my projects continued and changed.
In 2008 I got the idea to start a blog on development. While researching the possibilities I found WordPress, but I absolutely wanted my site to be hosted by myself. In that case I needed a WordPress instance running on my (virtual) server. My hosting company, Strato, supported the necessary prerequisites (PHP, MySQL), but I had (and have) a full-time job, so I was never going to do the installation myself.

I found a student capable and willing to create my blog. He suggested to move over the full website to a WordPress instance, not only the blogging part itself. So in 2008, after 9 years, my website was reshaped for the first time.

In the first several years, I had no problems: I produced some blog entries, updated my site content regularly, and when some system updates needed to be done, I paid my system administrator to do so.
But students tend to remain students only for so long, so at some point I lost my system administrator. For a while, I managed to get by by myself. Until WordPress stopped supporting the MySQL version I still was using. And not updating WordPress was not an option, because of the security fixes.
Since I was no longer blogging much anyway, the real need for WordPress for my professional website was no longer an absolute requirement. Initially, I simply disabled all WordPress functionality that was or could be compromised. But that could not be a long-term solution.

Therefore, in 2017 I started on a new implementation with the same but updated contents, a similar (old-fashioned but simple) design.
I had a few requirements:

The site should be easy to maintain by myself, even in busy phases of my professional life.
The site shall be compatible with all major browsers, based on XHTML and CSS, and easily checked by the W3C validators.
The site shall be fully operational without activating Javascript. Javascript is a great extension of the possibilities of a site, but for the purpose of my site it is not necessary, and security-aware people disable Javascript by default.
If a visitor has a small screen, only the basic information shall be indicated (contact information, availability), together with a link to the full site.

Except for the last requirement, everything has been realized in this new website: Pure XHTML with CSS, easily maintainable by using SSI (Server Side Includes), no use of Javascript.
The last requirement is a bit difficult to realize without Javascript. I'll leave that for later.

This design will hopefully last another 9 years. We'll see what happens then.
Happy surfing!