It’s no coincidence I stopped updating The Serpent right around the time my first child was born, that was a wild few years! Fortunately, a long weekend appeared over the horizon and allowed me time to sit down and catch up on some things. One of them being The Serpent.

I’ve never really enjoyed web design, development is fun – but design? That stuff hurts my head. When I started toying with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it was immediately clear that understanding all the nuances between browsers would be a full-time job – so I always kept it at arm’s length.

The Serpent was always written by hand without much assistance from frameworks and libraries. That stopped when I wanted the site to look good on mobile devices. Now I’ve discovered a world of tools which I could have only wished for back in the early 2000’s, Bootstrap, Open Iconic, Jekyll to name a few – have all made a redesign possible, without the need to become a full-time web designer, isn’t the future wonderful?

Today, for the first time - redesigning my site involved actual shopping! I’d look around and compare icon libraries, choosing Open Iconic, for its simple Bootstrap integration, easy scaling of icons and minimal installation requirements.

	Posted May 6, 2019
	Written by John Payne