I redesigned my homepage. New layout, calmer typography, fewer boxes, the version that finally felt like me. I committed it, the pipeline deployed it, the live site showed the new homepage. Done, I thought.
Then, much later, I clicked through my own site the way a visitor would.
Home looked new. Every other page, projects, skills, writing, contact, the AI work page, was still the old admin dashboard: heavy rounded cards, gradient panels, a header from a design I had already abandoned.
The redesign had landed on one page out of eight.
Why it happened
The redesign was a single file: the homepage.
The other pages shared a common layout component, so they inherited the shared navigation and footer. They did not inherit a design language. Each page carried its own copy of the same heavy card styling, written by copy-paste. When the homepage changed, nothing told the other seven that they had just become the odd ones out.
This is design drift. It is not one mistake, it is the absence of a mechanism that notices when the same idea exists in two versions. Same shape as every other silent failure in this garden: the system did less than it claimed, and looked completely healthy while doing it.
The fix is not "restyle seven pages"
The tempting fix is to restyle each page by hand and promise to keep them in sync. That just moves the problem to next time, and next time you will be busier.
What actually removes drift is taking away the ability for two versions to exist.
Extract the shared pieces. The new eyebrow label and page header became two small components. Every page imports them instead of re-declaring them.
Make one file the source of truth. The homepage hard-coded which projects to feature, while the project data already had a flag for exactly that. Now there is one answer instead of two that can disagree.
Delete the old copies. The previous header, sidebar, cards and their CSS were left behind like fossils. Removing them is what stops the next person, me, in six months, from copying the wrong one.
The part I keep relearning
Consistency is not something you achieve once. It is something you have to be able to detect.
My checks could tell me money was right to the sen, but nothing told me two pages had stopped matching, because I had never written down what "matching" meant in a form a machine could verify.