Finally a new fresh (blog) site

I created my first personal website on 15 September 1996. A few years later I updated the design a bit, which at the time I thought was pretty decent. But after more than ten years, it started looking quite stale and simple and, I must confess, amateurish. As such things go, for many years I regularly thought: Sometime I must get around to updating to a better site. With a nicer more modern design. And perhaps with a blog on the homepage, so it’s easier to write a little comment (or a longer piece) anytime I feel like sharing an idea with the world.

My old site was bilingual (English and Dutch) in the sense that most pages had a translation in both languages. Except for most of the longer articles, some of which are in Dutch and some in English. But over time I found it was to cumbersome, and a restriction of creativity, to want to maintain both an English and a Dutch version of all text. So I am now setting it up differently. The site is still bilingual, but in a different way. My main site is in English, with an English blog on the homepage and menu links to some main pages in English. But I will also keep a smaller Dutch subsite at henrysturman.com/dutch. This will contain a Dutch blog and a different Dutch menu with links to specifically Dutch content, such as a list of articles in Dutch. I plan to post general ideas and articles in English, while I will continue to write in Dutch about things relevant specifically for the Netherlands or about Dutch (political or otherwise) events.

I will be transferring much of the content from my old site to this new site, except that for general pages with 2 translations I will genererally keep the English version and discard the Dutch version, as said to make those pages easier to maintain. New is that I will be allowing comments under all my articles and posts. I always think it’s good to engage the reader and welcome interactive debate. People often don’t like to be criticized, but I tend to think in general you can learn much more from your critics than those who agree with you. Although complements are of course more than welcome as well

Next step of course will be to also update by business sites www.sturman.net and www.sturman.nl which are in a similar sad state, to the point of becoming an embarresment, of late 90s amateuristic design.