About

Davor

I have been making websites ever since the end of the previous century. As a web designer—also called “UX designer” or “product designer”—I’ve been blessed with doing a job which is a joy to do. I can happily say I can hardly recall dreading any Monday, or waiting for the weekend to begin.

I was born in Croatia, where I lived for the first 35 years of my life. I moved to Sweden in 2015, along with my wife and our cat. Today our family is richer for a wonderful kid and another cat. I honestly couldn’t be happier with how things turned out.

This website

Conceptually

My introduction to the World Wide Web back around 1998. was exciting and almost romantic. There were little to no rules, but the same could be said about technical capabilities in every sense of the word. Back then, websites were mostly an amazing new medium for personal expression. The amazing part was the fact a website was in a way an infinite canvas which could be shared with the world.

Another amazing side of the Web 1.0 era was the community, which was as supportive and friendly as they come.

In a way, this website tries to recreate the spirit of the websites we were building back then. It will also have a blog. All due respect to platforms like Medium or Substack, which have taken over the blogging world. I like my blog to have a dash of personality. As a web designer, I am not only uniquely qualified to do that well, I enjoy making it happen!

As described in the following section, I tried to design and implement everything—design and development, both front and back—on my own. This couldn’t have been possible without huge support from the community.

Technically

Front-end

This website is built and published with Webstudio (affiliate link). Webstudio is an amazing website builder that empowers and promotes building websites that are unmatched in performance, accessibility and flexibility.

Webstudio relies on Cloudflare for hosting, which guarantees the fastest possible load times, automatic asset optimization, as well as unmatched security and availability.

Thanks to Webstudio, I became aware of how amazing Cloudflare is, and have since moved all my domains there—completely or just the DNS management part for domains they don’t offer hosting for yet.

CMS

Unlike the competition, Webstudio doesn’t offer their own CMS. Instead, they enable connecting to almost anything that allows for creating and managing databases to be used as a headless CMS. Yes, even tools like Notion or Airtable!

For this website, I decided to use Ghost as my headless CMS.

This instance of Ghost is self-hosted via PikaPods which allows me to enjoy features like “custom integrations”—which is essential for connecting Ghost to Webstudio—at a fraction of the cost compared to paying for Ghost on their own “cloud” service. Just for illustration, a cloud sub with custom integrations through Ghost.org would cost $300 for a year. With PikaPods, that cost will be around $25. For the year. That’s a 92% discount, yay!

Web analytics

Another self-hosted app running on PikaPods is Umami, easy-to-understand analytics which also respects the privacy of website visitors and doesn’t rely on cookies to collect data. Again, at Umami’s cloud it would cost $86/year. With PikaPods, only $15/year. Another fat discount (83%) when comparing self-hosting with PikaPods and the standard cloud solution.

And that’s it for now! This website is still being designed and built, so apologies if it feels incomplete or rough around the edges. In a way, it’s being built in-the-open, and I consider it an exercise in letting go of the ambition to get everything pixel-perfect before it’s ready for prime-time. This isn’t how life works, and nobody relies to this website to save their life, so there you have it 😄