We are running another new site update to celebrate the end of this year! As we prepare to enter the year 2024, “the year of great shifting”, we decided to release an update to one important thing in our website: the homepage.

This new homepage is our final result from our multi-year journey in researching the perfect kind of homepage for our website with its unique purposes. And in this blog post, we’re excited to document what we have tried over the past years, and how we came to this new layout today.

Iteration 0: The “Linktree-New Tab” page (circa 2021).

The main concept behind this is that the entire website should be divided into two sections, including a permanent sidebar that is dedicated for showing recommended links and contact information, as well as a long-scrolling feed just like our older website (at reinhart1010.github.io). This idea was straight taken off from Linktree and the common “new tab” page, like Microsoft Start.

But it didn’t work well for some obvious reasons: reinhart1010.id is not a news website. And people might just want to check out our website to grasp some general and important information about us (think of portfolio websites).

Iteration 1: The legend of “Anak IT” come true.

“Anak IT” is a collquial Indonesian term for a common stereotype, that “a person studying or interested in the world of IT should be able to do powerful things, including hacking an ex’s Instagram account and fixing people’s air conditioners.” Similar stereotypes are found in other countries, too.

Even though that I lost all screenshots about the website, then implemented using Remix, the homepage supposed to start with the phrase “Lu kan Anak IT, masa gabisa ...?” to showcase Reinhart’s amazing abilities, including saving himself from Thanos’ snap by using pure JavaScript.

It was even filled by a faux Pricing Plans page; but instead of showcasing pricing tiers and benefits, it compares Reinhart’s skills against the requirements of Bank SulutGo (BSG), Kawasan Industri Makassar (KIMA), and Taraindo Energi Perkasa (TEP), three companies that posted “IT Staff” job offers, only to be criticized by the public for requiring such otherworldly skills, including “the ability to repair every electronics and any broken objects.”

It was hoped for the new homepage to present the image that the legend “Anak IT” is here and alive. But this idea was scrapped because we don’t just want people to treat our website as an ordinary portfolio website, even though that his skills sounds extraordinary.

It is imminent that this homepage was designed in the same energy as this TikTok video.

Iteration 2: Getting things more organized (early 2023).

If reinhart1010.id is neither just a news or portfolio website, so what it is? What it should have been? Why do we invest in real money to build our website from scratch, instead of just being active in social media?

We soon found our new mission to redefine what this site is and means, either Reinhart as a person, Reinhart and a team of his creations, and Reinhart as a company. We are building a polyglot website.

It doesn’t have to come in many languages (which the word “polyglot” is derived from), but to make it friendly and accessible to people who wanted to know about us in different contexts, including:

• reinhart1010.id as a contact card
• reinhart1010.id as a portfolio website
• reinhart1010.id as a personal blog
• reinhart1010.id as a corporate blog
• reinhart1010.id as a storefront
• reinhart1010.id as a hub for our apps and services
• reinhart1010.id as a product support hub
• reinhart1010.id as a BOTS’ storytelling medium
• reinhart1010.id as a medium to engage with people from church communities
• reinhart1010.id as a medium to engage with people from tech communities
• reinhart1010.id as a medium to engage with people from product-making communities
• reinhart1010.id as a medium to engage with people from the general public

It might sounds like “the super-app in the form of a website”, but unlike super-apps, which are commonly focused in operating numerous services, we would like to capture the diversity of our audiences and their perspectives about us.

We then decided attempted to list five more important things that we’d like to show you through our website:

• Our Team: describing The Robots of @reinhart1010.
• Products: A list of our digital products.
• Activities: List of blog posts, past projects, and current activity over GitHub, GitLab, OpenStreetMap, and Todoist.
• About: Reinhart’s general portfolio.
• You: A dedicated page to personalize your experience on this website. We were thinking of building our official @1010bots bot generator. Also some styling and privacy-related settings.

At this point, we were exploring different ways to improve our website’s user experience, including placing a permanent sidebar on the right instead of left for most of our websites and microsites. Unlike the previous designs, this sidebar adapts to the current page the user is visiting, e.g. for showing the number of comments and show related posts when inside a blog post.

So, how did we get to the homepage today?

Our new, finally-released homepage is designed so most people can grasp about 80% of our profile and revent updates in a single page. The five things mentioned earlier are mashed up into different sections on our homepage. We understood not everyone wants to review our set of published apps and services, and some commjnity-specific resources, so we put those links into the lower section of the page.

Perhaps the best part of this new homepage is that we’ve modernized the illuminated glass card effect as discussed here and here, and it now works better in light mode. We will eventually polish the rest of the glass-cards in our website the same way.

That’s all for now, back to work. Oh wait, we’re preparing for another round of great site updates to celebrate this year end!