I’ve simplified my website’s navigation structure. While I liked the idea of showing everything upfront, the big navigation was also overwhelming. With everything happening right now, I don’t want my website to feel overwhelming. I want the web to feel calm and my personal website is one of the places, which I control and where I can directly contribute to that.

Therefore I started by moving the navigation below the content on bigger screens like it already was on smaller ones. I also reduced the number of navigation items by merging different pages into one, e.g. the new projects page and good stuff page. I’ll probably move the navigation up, once I have about five items left. I’m also thinking about adding a language switch to make it even smaller.

I also thought about having just a single feed page, which combines blog posts and notes—though separate ones for English and German. I can still provide separate RSS feeds for each content type, but one feed would further simplify the navigation architecture. The problem is that I think feeds are in the end a dark design pattern. Maybe less so without algorithms, but endless scrolling still encourages spending more time on a website instead of doing other things. Maybe I don’t call it a feed and just add pagination? I don’t know.