About this website

When I set out to create this website I constructed a few requirements. Roughly in order of importance these are:

Security

As you may have expected, security was my primary concern. Because this website does not need programmed functionality (e.g. a login page) I decided to use plain HTML and CSS. That way I avoid the security issues that may occur on a web server that executes code.

I opted to make the website work without scripts. I tend to block it by default and only allow it on trusted domains. When I designed this site I kept that in mind, and concluded that my requirements could be implemented without scripts.

I decided to use common typefaces for this page, though I had some nice typefaces that would have looked better, such typefaces might be blocked as they are a vector for malicious payloads. I decided to stick to basic FreeSans and Arial to avoid such issues.

The issue these two techniques have in common is that they rely on

Ease of access

You may have noticed that the design is responsive to some changes, try resizing the browser window and you will see that the page changes to match the new size to an extent. CSS3 allows for partial responsive design where previously this was all left to scripts. I consider CSS the “correct” way to create a responsive UI – it is the part responsible for the style of the page – but alas the development, acceptance and support of new CSS standards is not as fast as the changes in webpage usage in recent years. Therefore this website could have had a more responsive design through the use of scripts.

An advantage of not using JavaScript is that the website is not slowed down by scripts, and will probably load and render fast even on devices with very limited processing capacities. Given the increase in processing power of even the low-end web-capable devices, this is not much of a concern any more.

Graphical design

Though I do have experience with design software and the graphical design process, I do not consider myself a graphical designer. For this website I aimed for a clean and calm look, since I find pages with too many visual bells and whistles aggravating.

Legal

I could have used existent designs or derived something from those, but I wanted this site to be my own work. Almost everything on this site is my own creation.

Included works not by me are:

I am an advocate of permissive licences and Free Software. Therefore various individual works shown on this website are licensed using Creative Commons licences. If this is the case, it will be indicated in the file metadata.

Contact

My contact details are available in my curriculum vitae which can be downloaded from the CV page. The details are not directly available on this website to prevent spam robots from grabbing them.