When I started developing more websites, I quickly realized I needed to pick a framework. After a few tries, I landed on Astro for static sites.
With this project I wanted to demonstrate my CSS/HTML mastery. Obviously since this is a templated repo the design is not too different from the original astrowind project, but I did quite a bit of systematic cleanup to get an opinionated yet scalable CSS setup. I'm particularly happy about the margin-top only system I landed with, as well as the automatic dark/light utilities which did lose some flexibility but I think it is worth it for the simple static sites this template is meant to build.
My biggest learning lesson from building this starter template is simply npm library balance. While looking for a solution I stumbled upon this article. It was kind of depressing but hey what is software if there aren't problems.
I'm building a restaurant website using this template, and before 2025 closes I plan to replace my academy website (I built v1 using Squarespace for time) with a custom site using this template. Great to see some of the investment I made into this paying off in the wild. I'm pretty sure I can build out static sites faster with this template than with using Squarespace now.