This Site

What it is

This case study is the site itself. There is no Squarespace, no Webflow and no theme from a marketplace: it is a Hugo project with its own layouts, a homepage and case-study template built on Hugo’s Go templating, and CSS written for this site alone. The other projects show what I can build. This one is the part that usually stays hidden, which is how I get something built onto a domain and keep it there.

It is also bilingual. Every page exists in English and Arabic, the Arabic version runs right-to-left, and each language has its own metadata and link preview image rather than sharing the English one.

Why this one

Saying “I can deploy things” is easy and does not tell you much. Pointing at the repository, the DNS records and the page you are currently reading is a more useful thing to offer, because you can go and check all three.

The build

I chose Hugo over a JavaScript framework because a portfolio is content rather than an application. Static generation means there is no client-side routing to go wrong, nothing to hydrate, and a build fast enough that I can change a line and see it immediately. The homepage and case-study templates are this project’s own baseof, single and index layouts rather than a downloaded theme, so the hero, the work grid and the about section are laid out exactly the way I wanted them.

The deploy

This is the part a website builder does for you, and it turned out to be the most interesting engineering in the project:

• Git-based deploys. The repository is connected to Cloudflare, so every push to main triggers a fresh Hugo build and redeploy. There is no manual upload step anywhere in the process.
• A platform migration mid-setup. Cloudflare was in the middle of folding Pages into Workers while I was configuring this, so the dashboard did not match the documentation and the build kept producing a site with nothing in it. What fixed it was adding a wrangler.jsonc pointing at Hugo’s output directory, which is what the new Workers static-asset path reads.
• Real DNS, on a free domain to begin with. The site started out on sophianawasreh.dpdns.org, registered through DigitalPlat and delegated to Cloudflare with external nameservers rather than DigitalPlat’s own DNS, which meant waiting out actual nameserver propagation instead of assuming it had worked.
• Moving to its own domain without breaking the old links. It now lives at alnawasreh.dev, but I had already sent the old address out on my CV, so the old domain stays attached and forwards every request to the same page on the new one. The first version of that redirect did nothing at all. Cloudflare serves a matching static file before the Worker’s code ever runs, so the old domain carried on quietly showing the whole site, and what fixed it was telling Workers to run the code first. The new domain’s email went much the same way, with Google bouncing a verification message because its mail servers were still remembering, for up to half an hour, a lookup from before the mail records existed.

None of that is complicated once you know it. It was worth doing because it is the layer I would otherwise have been guessing about, and now I am not.