🖥️ Building the Kassiopeia Website

🤯 A Surprising Passion

I never thought I’d be interested in building a website again, since my days as nerdy teenager.
With the rise and dominance of social media, it felt like band websites were a relic—why bother, when everything lives on Instagram or TikTok?

But over time, social media started to feel more like a burden than a tool. The toxicity, the algorithms, the noise—it made me want a space of our own. Somewhere slower, more intentional, and ours.

So when I started messing around with some home server stuff and bought a personal domain, I figured:

Why not grab one for the band too?

We ended up choosing kassiopeia.band.
The .music domain required payment and membership, and options like .tv or .fm didn’t feel quite right. I also didn’t love the idea of settling for something clunky like kassiopeiaband.com.

✈️ The Airport Origin Story

While stuck in an airport one day, I started researching minimal tools for building a clean, manageable site. That’s when I found Zola, a static site generator written in Rust.

I began with a premade template, but quickly found myself fighting against it—trying to reverse engineer someone else's structure without really understanding how it was meant to work.

Taking inspiration from the half-z template, I teamed up with ChatGPT to build something a little more barebones and intentional: a 50/50 split layout that I could understand and grow from.

🛠️ Learning by Doing

Once I wrapped my head around the basics—template HTML files, content markdowns, and SASS for styling—I started building up the site from the ground up.

We now have:

  • Blog posts
  • About section
  • Gear + tech stack page
  • A spot for lyrics and discography (coming soon)

I also set up a GitHub repository, so Zane can remotely contribute content and updates.

And once I got our demo player working—streaming music straight from the site—it finally felt real.

🎨 On AI-Generated Art

AI art gets a lot of hate—and for valid reasons in many cases. But for us, with no budget and a need to quickly prototype a visual identity, it’s been a useful tool. Some of the visuals generated by AI gave the site atmosphere and style during a phase when we had zero assets.

We absolutely hope to hire a real artist down the line. For now, this is a non-commercial project made out of passion. We're not here to profit—just to express ourselves.

🚧 Under Construction (But Alive)

Now that we have a working skeleton, we’re turning our focus toward real content:

  • Blog updates about the album in progress
  • Gear breakdowns and tech insights
  • Demos and future releases
  • Eventually: lyrics, guitar tabs, a gallery, maybe even a merch page

We’re also planning some YouTube content—including:

  • Cooking POV videos set to our tracks
  • Guitar playthroughs
  • DIY project breakdowns
  • Maybe some dev logs for fellow nerds

This site started as an experiment but is becoming something more personal and lasting.
Thanks for checking it out—and stay tuned for more.

- R