Building My Own Site from the Ground Up (Part 1: The Beginning)

A Little Backstory

This isn’t the first personal site I’ve created for myself. Back when I had just started working, I set up a simple GitHub Page using Gatsby. But at that time, I didn’t really know what to do with it — and, well, it just sat there collecting digital dust.

It’s been about four years since then. A lot has changed, and I’ve grown quite a bit — both personally and professionally. That’s why I feel ready to start this again: to have a space where I can collect my thoughts, share what I’ve been working on, and maybe even write about some random things along the way.

Why SSG — and why Eleventy?

The idea for this site was never to be a full-fledged web application, but rather a simple, lightweight space to express myself. A static site generator (SSG) fits that goal perfectly.

Choosing Eleventy over Gatsby was a deliberate decision. I wanted to try something different from the usual React-based setup, and a quick bit of research pointed to Eleventy being praised for its great developer experience and flexibility. Plus, I’ll be honest — I just wanted an excuse to play with something new.

What about the UI?

For the design side, I’m using Tailwind CSS together with DaisyUI. It gives me a nice balance between customization and ready-to-use components, which helps me focus more on structure and content rather than fiddling endlessly with CSS.

It’s been fun figuring out how everything fits together — though not without a few moments of confusion here and there.

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Right now, the site isn’t fully done. It’s very much a work in progress — I’m still experimenting with layouts, tweaking styles, and wiring up the blog section. But I thought it’d be interesting to document the process as I go: the small wins, the weird bugs, the “aha” moments, and maybe even the mistakes along the way.

In this series, I’ll be walking through how I’m building the site from scratch — from setting up Eleventy, to styling it with DaisyUI, to deploying it on GitHub Pages with a custom Cloudflare domain. Think of this less as a tutorial and more as a build log — a developer’s journal of figuring things out one step at a time.

So if you’re curious about Eleventy or just enjoy following along with side projects, come along for the ride. Let’s see where this goes.

What’s Next

In the next part, I’ll dive into the actual setup — getting Eleventy running, wiring it up with Tailwind, and experimenting with WebC templating.

Spoiler: I got a little too excited about WebC components and ended up breaking a few things before figuring out how they actually work. 😅

If you’ve ever wondered how to start a simple site with Eleventy — or if you just enjoy watching a work in progress take shape — stay tuned!