I've recreated my site yet again. I removed the profile-esque front page I had for a standard introduction page. I also removed my photo and the funny stripe it had down the left for bigger screens. It's just a plain site now.
I also converted to eleventy because I'm going to start using it for website development from here on unless my client wants me to target something else. It gives me way more power and control. There's more to learn but less to fight with.
I also used stuff I learned from every layout though not a lot in this site. I used more from there at Coastal Movement Studio.
Finally, I removed the old blog articles that were just about me learning. That stuff was probably not actually useful for anyone but me. I'm not sure if I'm going to totally stop doing that kind of article, but for now I want to concentrate on other types of things for this site.
First client website
I recently published the first site I did for someone else. It went through a first iteration in which I used Hugo to generate the site. I wasn't really happy with that code and there were some changes needed to the site so I redid it in 11ty. I had also bought Every Layout and redid all of the site css using things I learned from there. Finally, to get started on 11ty I leveraged this tutorial.
Everyone is pretty happy with it as it is now. The layout works way better, especially on smaller displays that I'd had trouble getting to behave before using the techniques in Every Layout.
I had her register her own domain name that I then configured to point at her website hosted on GitLab Pages. This is a free service that hosts a static website from a git repository. This site is then configured to use Let's Encrypt to serve over https--this is important even though she's not currently selling anything or keeping peoples' information at that site.
The repository is configured to build the site any time I push changes to the main branch. The GitLab documentation on setting this all up is very well done and easy to follow so you don't need me for it, but I've done it a few times now so can be a big help making sure it gets configured correctly and yes, you can mess things up. I help people through stuff like this too though and the objective here is really to empower my clients to be able to do more on their own with reduced expenses. In theory, she can edit the content of her site any time she wants and it'll get updated and I'm not needed. This is going to require some training in things like git though, which is a developer tool but ties in with system tools and isn't THAT hard to understand--there's also a decent online editor that GitLab provides.
The cost for renewal of the domain is going to be much higher next year but still < $50 probably. So long as GitLab continues to offer this service that's the only ongoing cost required to keep the site up and it'll just stay that way as long as the domain is registered. The primary expense is in site development and changes. To have me create a site like it would cost something in the $1-2000 range and take 1-2 weeks. I work directly with you at your level so you get what you want.