# Personal website 2025 The case study about building my portfolio + personal website using Obsidian Publish and markdown. The series of events and triggers that led to this new version of my personal website and portfolio: - Obsidian released a new feature update, Properties! - I realized that I haven't been using my subscription of Obsidian Publish at all since early bird pricing was announced - I didn't have a real need to continue my personal website on Ghost CMS since I don't use the newsletter feature. I create content maybe once a year. - Content I create is mostly text and captions for screenshots. It's too much overhead for me to customize a Ghost theme. - I wanted to consolidate and simplify my workflow to the bare minimum: Markdown Finally, in 2025, the migration is complete. ## Content structure ### Use of tags, templates Tags are used to indicate types of content. In Obsidian, each piece of content is called a "note." Templates with set properties are created for: - Note - general note, flexible to add whatever properties are needed - Project - Content template for describing a project - Speaking - Content template for public speaking engagements - Writing - Content template for published content written elsewhere. Could be used to collect a sample of my written work that is already housed elsewhere. - Blog - Content template for general writing purposes that is intended to be published ### Tags for skills and deliverables Example: #skill/Research #skill/InformationArchitecture For any project that highlights a particular skill, these tags helps to create links to bring different projects together though ### Tags for services if the focus of the project is IA as a service Example #serviceType/InformationArchitecture ### Notes for clustering links Pages created for clients, organizations to help with clustering related projects. Example: [[World IA Association]], [[DIA Design Guild]]. ## Information architecture On Obsidian Publish, there is only the concept of a side navigation. This works well enough for my purposes. The key here is to mimic the important landing pages you'd expect on a personal website and portfolio. For the content that I have, I only need the following main landing pages in the nav: * About * Projects - for portfolio purposes * Speaking - for career development purposes * Writing - for portfolio purposes * Contact Debatable - Data + Privacy - Consulting/Services There's an option to customize navigation in Obsidian Publish settings and hide what pages don't need to be displayed. ![[Pasted image 20250112170137.png]] Caption: Screenshot of the Obsidian Publish settings dialog where you can customize the navigation. From this screenshot, you can see that you can hide content from being displayed in the nav menu. I've hidden the content directories `/notes`, `/projects`, `/speaking`, and `/writing`. You can access content in those directories if you try to change the URL. I've made the intentional decision to keep the table of contents on each page. I have always appreciated the side table of contents that tells people how a page is structured. ## Considerations for SEO Permalinks are manually setup. Each note is structured in order with h1, h2, h3. I can customize the h1 to be more descriptive and different from the file name, which is appreciated. There are options to do more with SEO such as including a description property. It's a manual effort to do so. ## Learning outcomes So far I like how the content structure has emerged from this. It follows a very personal train of thought. I'll update this as I gather feedback from visitors. See also [[Coda Content Design Portfolio]] Published: 2023-09-03 Last updated: 2025-01-12