Day two was the big one.
Morning: mockups
Six directions were sketched as static HTML and approved as a set: Plain (a text homepage with a sidebar), Classic (table layout, tiled background, visitor counter), GeoCities (animated GIFs and a guestbook link), DOS (a command prompt), Console (a tiny game in a cabinet), and Eighties (neon grid and chrome type). Each is a full site, not a colour swap: layout, type, and copy all change.
Afternoon: the skeleton and the contract
Before any theme was built properly, three pieces of shared ground were laid.
- A theme contract. Every theme is a folder with the same set of page templates and a manifest. The build checks that each one implements every page, so no theme can be missing a link the others have.
- An edge routing function. A Cloudflare Pages Function picks the theme for a visit and serves that theme’s version of the requested page. The choice travels in a cookie so the whole visit stays consistent.
- A page registry. The list of pages (home, projects, links, about) lives in one place; themes render them, they do not define them.
The six themes were then built in parallel, one worker per theme, against the contract.
Evening: QA and launch
A QA pass found six defects before launch: a broken link in one theme, a missing page in another, two contrast problems, a cookie that did not persist, and a redirect loop on one path. All six were fixed the same evening, and the site went live on kongomax.com. HSTS and the www-to-apex redirect were added the following morning.