As of this morning, the latest big update to my website is live! Thank god.
Not many people will care and probably take all this for granted, but I’ve worked my arse off for the past week rebuilding this whole site from scratch. I’m guessing this whole project has taken me about 30 hours in total, and despite it being a bit infuriating sometimes, I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’m glad I did it all myself.
If I had given the job of making my website to someone else, a proper web developer, I just know I would’ve ended up constantly asking for little changes until I took it out of their hands and said “let me just do it myself, give it here”… so I saved both me and a fictional web developer’s time.
I originally started my own artist website in January of 2022, and I built it on a platform called Wix, which I remained for just under 4 and a half years before switching to WordPress for this current version.
On Wix, you can actually go back and view past versions of your site, so I gathered some screenshots to share with you today, because I thought it’d be really cool to see the evolution of my site over the years – collecting these was such a walk down memory lane!
Version 1.0 – January 25, 2022
“You won’t regret discovering me” at the top there makes me laugh. I wonder if anyone actually discovered me back then and still knows me now…
Version 1.1 – December 2, 2022
For most of 2022 my website remained in the Version 1 state and I didn’t really touch it apart from the occasional update on the “music” page when I released something new, but in December I revamped the homepage to look like this – a look that I actually quite like to this day!
Version 1.2 – December 31, 2022
Pretty similar vibe but I thought it’s worth sharing. This was right when my music started going slightly viral with the song “Microwave”.
This version was published at 11:27pm on New Year’s Eve, which is pretty funny. I think it shows how dedicated I am / nerdy I am by the fact that I was 15 and just half an hour before New Year’s I was in my bedroom editing my website…
Version 1.3 – May 10, 2023
For some reason I decided to ditch the cool text menu and replace it with a minimalistic logo-only front page. No idea why, I think this looks like shit.
ADVICE:
If you’re into web design or you’re an artist looking to make your own website for your music, do yourself a favour and don’t just stick your logo on the front page! A curious fan of yours will land on there and most likely click off straight away.
Give them something to do instead! Some sort of menu thing (like I did before) is good, but something like an email signup form (like what’s live on my site currently) is even better. Or at least some other call to action like a cool-looking announcement for a new song… give the viewer something.
Version 2 – January 30, 2024
Now this was a big change, as you can tell. It was right around this time that I was really getting into analogue recording with cassettes and such (which lead to the creation of the album Return To Zero).
As my music and recording process began to take on a much more retro feel, by extension so did my website.
It’s not visible here since this is a still image, but all those little pictures are actually moving GIFs, and the central logo was also animated, which gave the site a really cool “alive” vibe. Very 90s / 2000s.
That’s what the music page looked like. All I ever needed was Arial and Times New Roman…
Version 3 – August 8, 2025
For over a year my site remained as that green, retro-styled chunk of code, and it gradually fell into disuse.
However, with the official conception of the Jamaraz Music Universe in the Summer of 2025, I revamped the entire Ricky Jamaraz brand, which reflected itself in a pretty major visual shift in the website while still keeping a similar “old internet” inspired look.
Version 4 – May 30, 2026
This is what the homepage looks like as of writing, although by the time you read this it may have changed a little.
I still wanted to keep the spirit of versions 2 and 3 with the central column over the maximalist background for that 2000s-era charm, but it’s a bit more simple and easier on the eyes now, which I’m very happy with.
Here’s to the future of rickyjamaraz.com !