This design ran holas.pl from 2008 to 2015 — seven years, which is a long time for a personal site to go untouched.

The design

The visual direction was dark and technical: black background with a smoke/wave graphic (credited to Maja in the footer), blue-glow header reading "Holas's Home Page", and famfamfam Sweet Icons for social sharing buttons. The homepage opened with a short intro — "Jestem programistą i webdeveloperem freelancerem" — followed by a featured projects carousel (Ciekawsze realizacje) showcasing client work with thumbnail navigation, and a blog post feed below. Navigation: Strona Główna, Wpisy, O mnie, Kontakt, Polityka ciasteczek, Szukaj, with an RSS feed button. The footer carried a search box, a recommended links section (Strony polecane), and post archives.

The build

Built on WordPress with a customised pixeled base theme (footer: "Powered by WordPress and pixeled. Corrections, changes and translation by Holas."). The layout was desktop-first, built for 1024px-wide screens — the standard target at the time.

Mobile was handled separately: a dedicated mobile skin served via user-agent detection, switching templates based on whether the visitor was on a phone or a desktop browser. This was the conventional approach before Ethan Marcotte's responsive web design article (2010) shifted the industry toward fluid, single-codebase layouts.

holas.pl old design — desktop Desktop layout.

holas.pl old design — mobile skin Dedicated mobile skin, served via user-agent detection.

The reason it lasted so long was simple: it worked. Posts rendered correctly, the mobile skin covered phones adequately, and there was no compelling reason to rebuild. But by 2014–2015 the cracks were showing — the fixed-width desktop layout looked dated on larger screens, the two-template maintenance overhead was annoying, and the broader ecosystem had moved on to responsive design as the baseline.

In 2015 I rebuilt the site from scratch with a fully responsive WordPress theme. See that: holas.pl — new responsive design (2015).

Archived snapshot on Wayback Machine.