What I am ultimately looking to do after I get everything converted is to split out the content into a personal website, and then a separate blog repo and make it easier to manage.
For now, I just want to get the basics (which is already a struggle with this HTML theme) and then from there, start reducing / simplifying. But yeah, there is an insane amount of CSS and JS in this theme, and once I can at least get it to a point where I feel comfortable about it - start reducing and minimizing.
After reading this thread, I took a look at your site and repo. The theme looks pretty cool, but it looks like you have to manually manage the whole thing based on the theme’s requirements. Themes are nice because it comes pre-packaged, but it can also hold you back unless you know the inner workings and coding style of the theme developer.
The first thing I noticed is that your home page is a long scroll, which is fine, but it is also Jekyll data to display content. That can be a bit difficult to do because then you usually have to use a grammar-checking tool outside your site. Ideally, each one of those major sections is a markdown page in Jekyll. You can use a CMS like Forestry.io or edit the pages using Grammarly (or something similar) in GitHub. You can always combine multiple pages so they look like they are “combined” in the home page.
Also, I can see why you might want to manage the blog separately. You have to manually enter each blog item on your page, rather than let the Liquid language do that work for you. You can also use CSS grids on the home page to show the top post(s), then have a page that displays the rest of the posts rather than try to manage them all just on the home page.
Here is a video series I created you might find helpful. All the code is reusable and if you want to stick with the styles your theme uses, that is easy enough to do.
Here is the repo:
And here is the live site:
Hope you find this helpful.