NoGood is now a static site. A portfolio, blog and maybe even a digital garden.
This is the fifth version of the NoGood website in roughly the same amount of years. The original site launched in 2021 and marked the start of NoGood. It was a small bitcoin-only shop, which I set up as an experiment after installing my first bitcoin node. The second site was an overhauled version of the shop, that focussed on the NoGood crew and it's background story. The third was a general portfolio. NoGood had grown into my full-time job at that point. I redesigned it once again in 2024. Which brings us to the current site, although this time it's not just a visual update.
The previous sites all ran Wordpress, and used a theme that offered more functionality then I ever needed. It was Woocommerce compatible. It enabled Typekit and Google fonts. Jetpack kept track of user stats. I designed each page with Elementor. It looked great!
But. It. Was. So. Slow. With todays internet speeds, and our short attention spans, staring at a blank page for five seconds feels like forever. I sometimes wondered if the site was loading at all, or if my request got stuck somewhere on the information super highway. I figured that my sites contain a lot of graphics that could account for the slow speeds, so I converted all images to low-resolution, optimised formats and enabled lazy loading. It didn't change anything.
During my research for the NoGood art book and through my converstations with Sebastix I discovered the IndieWeb, Jamstack and static site generators and became fascinated by the concept of performance optimised webpages. I realised how unnecessary complex my Wordpress sites were, and how little use I had for the functionality they provided. The amount of external resources and scripts they loaded was astonishing. Using Typekit fonts? Better contact Adobe first. Want visitor stats? Let's ask Google Analytics or something called Wordpress Stats. Installed plugins? Let's add a bunch of JavaScript.
A static site
I built the new site using 11ty, a static site generator. It's simple and lightweight and loads only one external resource - satellite.earth displays the NoGood Radio animation on the homepage. It's a static site, meaning there's no dynamic content and your browser processes the exact same html as anyone else's. It's styled with basic CSS, only uses system fonts, serves optimised images and does not collect user data. I don't know that you're reading this or which links you decide to click next.
Basically everything on this site is a blog post, allowing me to share more context about the projects I'm working on. Some posts will be finalized upon publishing, others will be updated with new information or work as it becomes available. As a result, the site will function as a blend between a regular blog and a digital garden.
It's very much a work in progress. I plan on adding extra functionality in the future, such as an RSS feed, social cards and webmentions.
The shop remains operational but has moved to a subdomain. It continues to use Wordpress (without a theme), which is not ideal, but I don't know of a better solution for managing an online shop. It must handle shipping data, stock inventory, and payments, making it impossible to be a static site (right?). It's still a bitcoin-only shop and I'm still running a BTCPay Server to process payments.