Markdown

Markdown is a way of writing formatted text using the keyboard alone. A word wrapped in two asterisks becomes bold. A line starting with a hash mark becomes a heading. A word in square brackets followed by a web address in parentheses becomes a link. No mouse, no toolbar, no menu of font sizes. You write it once, as a plain text file, and a program turns it into a normal-looking web page.

That plainness is the whole point. A Markdown file opens in absolutely anything: a text editor, an email, a terminal, a phone’s notes app. It has no hidden formatting, no version lock, no proprietary file format that only one piece of software can read. Ten years from now the same file will still open and still say exactly what it says today.

Why it matters to you

Every case study, blog post and service page on a site I build is a Markdown file. That means your content is not trapped inside a page builder’s database or a content management system’s export format. If you ever want to move the words somewhere else, you copy the file. There is no plugin to uninstall, no proprietary export to fight with.

It also means changes to your content are just changes to a text file, which fits naturally into the same version control system that tracks changes to the site’s code. A typo fix, a new paragraph, an updated phone number, each one is a small, readable change with a record of who made it and when.

How I use it

I write the actual words of your site, the paragraphs and headings that make up a page, in Markdown files that live in the site’s GitHub repository alongside the code. The layout, the navigation, the colours and the buttons around that text are built separately in Astro, so a Markdown file only ever has to describe the content, not the design.

When I hand a site over, those files are yours. If you want to edit a paragraph yourself, you can open the file, change the words between the formatting symbols, and submit that change as a pull request for me to review before it goes live, the same process I use myself.

What it looks like in practice

You will probably never open a Markdown file yourself unless you ask to. What you will see is a site where every page loads fast and reads cleanly, because the words behind it were never fighting a heavyweight editor to get formatted correctly. If you do look at one of the files, it reads almost like the finished page already, just without the styling: a line of hash marks for a heading, plain sentences underneath, a bracketed link where a link belongs. Nothing about it needs a manual.