My Corner of the Internet
I re-built my personal website, and wanted to share it with you
I’m one of the lucky ones who could buy a .com domain of their full name, many, many years ago. It also helps that my last name is not too common.
I created a cool landing page in 2018. It was a fun, creative experiment, where my head “turned around” the topics that were relevant to me at that time.
And I added animations (a lot) that started playing on mouse trigger.
But I haven’t used it for much. No content, no updates. Not really mobile-friendly.
The most you could do was find my email address.
It was never a priority, despite receiving a few hundred visitors every week.
But lately, I’ve been thinking of stepping up my online presence. And after seeing a post from one of my friends who was also working on her personal website, I took it as a sign.
So I decided to revamp johnnyfekete.com, bring it to 2025 while keeping its essence.
Do you remember the MTV show “Cribs”?
Well, this is my new corner of the internet. Let me show you around.
The home page
This page is the showstopper part of my website.
I wanted to keep the idea with the topics around my head, and turn to the selected one.
But I changed the five areas to new ones that are more relevant for my current self:
Creator
Product Engineer
Founder
Educator
Actor
I didn’t want to be too engineering-focused, as I do a lot more than that.
Instead, I took a deep breath and chose the areas where I’m trying to expand my impact.
The “actor” one was a particularly hard decision: I contemplated whether I should include it, or keep it focused “on work”.
But just like the coolest apartments reflect the owner’s personality, I also wanted to pour my whole self into it without filtering.
The old animations had to go. They felt outdated, and I didn’t want to just replace them with new ones.
Instead, I came up with this effect where once you move the mouse over any topic, the page gets covered with stripes of text running across the screen.
This felt a lot fresher, more modern, and honestly, more cheerful. Much closer to my identity.
The sad part is, I couldn’t keep the same functionality for mobile devices. The vertical layout and lack of mouse cursor don’t permit the head-rotation mechanism, but I think I managed to still bring over some of the magic by showing the text strips on tap event before navigating away.
Detail Pages
I am a perfectionist.
And perfect is the enemy of done.
So I consciously decided to go with big letters, bold colors, and not get lost in pixel-perfect designs.
I wanted to focus on having good, up-to-date content and publish the website instead of polishing it forever.
The five sub-pages cover key interest areas in my life.
Each one with examples, references. Full of small interactions, but I tried to find the balance and not overwhelm the users.
I found a design language through trial and error, and it felt like it was matching the style of the home page, with its colorful text highlights or rectangular card components.
I added some effects on page transitions, the interactive glow behind the face in the bottom corner, and whimsical hover states for the blog posts.
Really tried not to overdo it (be my judge).
These pages all work well on mobile; there were no challenges with implementing their layout on smaller screens.
And as they have a lot more content (well, the old website didn’t have any content, so the bar was pretty low), I hope that these pages will be useful for showcasing what I do.
Contact Page
I checked a few personal landing pages.
One thing stood out: the ones I liked didn’t have a boring contact form. Instead, they simply linked their social links and had their email address publicly visible.
I was evaluating if it’d lead to spam, but I felt that it’s more authentic if I also add the direct contact info instead of setting up an impersonal contact form.
So that’s what I did. I can always adjust it in the future.
How Did I Build It
It all started with the pictures. I re-did the photoshoot three times 🙄 (perfectionism, get out of my head)
With Photoshop’s magical ✨ background removal, I could get the transparent background with literally a single click (in my old website, I had to use lasso tools to get to mediocre results).
Then came the coding part. I am a software engineer with strong opinions, but I’m also lazy in typing a lot.
So instead, I used AI to write the code, instructing it step-by-step, reviewing the changes.
It was like having a personal assistant, doing everything as I asked them to do.
It was a good learning process also: bigger tasks failed more often than not, but if I always asked for tiny, incremental changes, it did an outstanding job.
So our cooperation looked like this: I was the one with the big picture and overview, and AI was my “Santa’s little helper” who did all the tasks for me.
It took about ~15-20 working hours to build it from scratch, once I had all the photos and text content.
Keeping It Live
Now that I have my new corner on the internet, it’s my task to keep it up-to-date.
Adding new articles, links, videos, and curating them.
So that in 7 years from now, I don’t have to look again at a stale, outdated website, but rather one that grew together with me.