Goal
The reason I started to actively seek a new personal website setup was to save money. I consider Framer’s basic plan of 20 USD/month way too much for a personal website. However, what I did like about Framer is that the website builder UX is intuitive. I was able to build the website in a day. There are tons of templates to choose from, and the free ones aren’t that bad.
To keep the same “quality of experience,” I took into consideration the following for my alternative:
- Price
- Ease of use
- Customizability
Why Astro?
The answer is luck.
I didn’t see the value in using a website builder now that I’ve gotten familiar with coding, particularly Svelte. So I started by looking for a template in Svelte. Well… there wasn’t much of anything because most personal website templates are written in React. After scouring the internet, I found finally found a cool project but it is using Astro. I’d never touched Astro but I was willing to give it a shot since it supports Svelte. I wasn’t concerned with trying out a new framework since my workflow with Cursor AI helps me learn new things surprisingly quickly.
So what’s next?
Not much! I’m happy with the result.
The website is now hosted on Vercel for $0, so that’s 80% of the value I was looking for. The project is well structured, so I can easily customize and extend it. It took me about a day to migrate the content.
I love the choice of using MDX for the blog posts. Its simplicity might motivate me to write more. I’m thinking about quarterly updates or ad hoc posts if I have something to share about the projects I’m working on.