Things I try to get right, on this site and on the ones I build for other people.
Within reach. A good website should not cost what agencies charge for one, and it should not need a specialist to change a sentence. Low price, few moving parts, and — the part people forget — it keeps working. No monthly fees for plugins, no yearly migration, no rebuild in three years because the thing it was built on went away.
Small enough to defend. I cannot promise a site nobody can break into; nobody honestly can. What I can do is make the surface small: no plugins, which is where most WordPress vulnerabilities live, and no code on the page that I did not put there.
Room to grow. A site can start as one page and stay that way for years. When it needs more — a webshop, a booking calendar, a members’ area — that is added to the site you already have. Nothing has to be rebuilt to make room for it, and nothing you published has to move.
Yours, and readable. Your own domain and your own server instead of a page inside somebody else’s platform. Content in plain HTML, structured so that a heading is a heading and a date is a date — which is what a machine needs in order to make sense of it, whether that machine is a search engine or something that does not exist yet. A small push in the direction of a web that is spread out rather than owned.
The name. Alligator echoes my family name, Allegaert; I chose it for the sound. The animal turned out to fit better than I knew: in the Everglades it digs the water holes that fish and birds survive the dry season in. More in Why an alligator.
Type. Everything you read here is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, a typeface drawn so that letters are hard to mistake for one another. Manrope carries the labels and the navigation; Fira Code appears only where code does. Two families for reading and a third with exactly one job. All three are variable fonts, self-hosted in the theme as four WOFF2 files, so nothing is fetched from anybody else’s server. Body text is set at 24px with a line height of 1.7, because size is the one typographic choice with real reading research behind it.
Colour. Mint cream #F4F8EE for the page and a deep green-black #1E2A17 for the text. Then alligator green #3A7A0E, clay #B5561F, a deeper green #234A11 and a muted green-grey #5F6E56. The notes section adds a cooler second set: petrol #35606A on a pale blue card #DAE8E9.
How it is made. A fork of the WordPress default theme Twenty Twenty-Five, maintained by hand. One stylesheet and four font files. Hosted on OVHcloud, in Europe.