By: Diya Pottangadi

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

I'm excited to finally launch my website, after more than a year of starting, scrapping, and restarting this project.

Last summer (2024), I set out to have my personal website developed and deployed by the end of summer. I had just learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP from my Internet Applications (IT202) class and was ready to apply them to my own project. But… I found myself stuck.

It wasn't the coding that was challenging, but the designing. At the time, I had a vision in my head that I couldn't translate to paper (I didn’t actually have a vision, but I thought I did). Ignorant of the design process, I tried to just wing it and start coding. The result? Not pretty.

So, I put the project away for a couple of months and decided to focus on school (though I did go back and relearn/practice HTML and CSS in my free time). During the school year, I took two IS/design-oriented classes—Design Thinking: Addressing Structural Inequality and Discovering User Needs for UX. I learned a lot about the design process during the Fall and Spring and was ready to go back to the drawing board to flesh out my ideas and create a vision. I spent hours looking into various portfolio websites, different styles, different designers, and gathering mental ideas of what I loved, liked, didn’t like, and what I wanted to incorporate. I wanted the website to be very much me. I spent hours on Figma wire-framing and getting the basic gist/structure of it down.

https://www.figma.com/proto/QGowS3wkhiGjnr3YPUy2go/Personal-Website-Prototype?node-id=0-1&t=UNAv82r6t1YAgdsi-1

As you can see, my current website and my prototype don’t look that alike. As I was developing, I made lots of changes.

Once I got the basic structure down on Figma, I was anxious to start developing. I just wanted to code and have it done. This was going to be my 4th attempt of creating a website, and I started again from scratch. My goal was to code almost all of it myself and with resources from the Internet (and not much ChatGPT — that thing lowkey kills critical thinking). I wanted to do it the “old-fashioned” way (pre-2023).

The fun part was picking out colors. I tried out so many different colors and gradients before settling on the ones on my website. Fun fact, I just picked colors from the color spectrum until I found something I liked. Something I absolutely adore about my website is the back gradient, from left dark blue to the right lighter blue. I also love the top-down gradient with the light white/blue to the light blue, and the blue pop/shadow of the content box connecting both gradients.