GallimoreBuilds.com
Building a personal brand website from scratch — no templates, no page builders. Pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript designed to document real engineering work and present it the way it deserves to be seen.
Why Build This
If you're doing real work — surveying land, designing drainage systems, mapping watersheds — a LinkedIn profile doesn't capture it. You need somewhere to actually show the work: what the problem was, how you approached it, what you built or figured out.
GallimoreBuilds.com started as a personal project to document engineering and technical work in a way that's honest and searchable. The design goal was simple: professional without being corporate, earthy without being rustic, functional without being bland.
How It Was Built
No frameworks, no CMS, no build tools. Just HTML files, a single CSS design system using custom properties, and vanilla JavaScript for interactivity. The site is deployed on Cloudflare Pages — free tier, fast global CDN, custom domain connected via Cloudflare DNS.
The design draws on earthy tones — dark greens, warm browns, and cream — to match the outdoor, land-focused nature of the work. Typography is Playfair Display (headings) + Inter (body), served by Google Fonts.
"Building your own site teaches you more about web fundamentals in a weekend than any tutorial ever will — you run into every problem yourself and have to solve it."
Features & Details
- Multi-page architecture: home, about, and individual project pages with consistent navigation and footer.
- Project carousel on the home page with tag-based filtering — click a tag to switch from carousel to filtered grid view.
- Custom tag creation: visitors can add their own filter tags, stored in localStorage.
- Project pages follow a blog-style layout (header, intro, details box, content sections, prev/next nav).
- Reusable project page template included — designed so new projects can be added by non-developers.
- Custom favicon using the GallimoreBuilds logo in browser tabs.
- Deployed to Cloudflare Pages via direct file upload; custom domain gallimorebuilds.com connected via CNAME + Proxied DNS.
Deployment & DNS
Getting the domain live required some debugging. Cloudflare Pages worked fine once the project was set up cleanly — but an old Worker route and a conflicting A record from a previous deployment caused 522 connection timeout errors that took a while to track down. The fix: delete the old Pages project, clear the DNS records, and start clean with the new project and a CNAME pointing to gallimorebuilds.pages.dev.
Lesson learned: Cloudflare has a lot of moving parts (Workers, Pages, DNS, Tunnels) and they can all interfere with each other. When something breaks, go layer by layer.
What's Next
The site will continue to grow as projects get completed. Planned additions include real project photos replacing the placeholders, a contact form, and potentially a simple blog section for field notes and write-ups.