this is the story of how contractorkeith.com got built.
why a new site
i had a jekyll site on github pages — contractorkeith.github.io. it worked, but it felt like a placeholder. two posts, a basic about page, and a theme i didn’t really understand. i wanted something i could actually grow into.
the stack
- astro with the astro paper theme — fast, static, markdown-based. no framework overhead.
- cloudflare pages for hosting — free, fast, auto-deploys from github.
- github for version control — push to main and the site updates.
why astro
i looked at next.js, hugo, and a few others. astro won because:
- it builds static html by default — fast and simple
- markdown blog posts just work
- the astro paper theme gave me a clean starting point without being over-designed
- no react runtime shipping to the browser unless you need it
why cloudflare pages
github pages is fine, but cloudflare pages gives me:
- a real custom domain with automatic https
- faster global cdn
- room to grow (workers, email routing, analytics) without switching platforms
what’s next
- more blog posts about what i’m building and learning
- adding projects as i build them
- maybe a contact form down the road
if you’re a contractor thinking about learning to code — or a coder curious about construction — stick around. this is where i’ll be writing about both.