Personal Blog Website Development

My draft site lives at https://a18392428-ai.github.io/Chesse/ and, at the moment, it is little more than a landing page. The assignment is to turn that placeholder into a clean, fast-loading personal blog that I can maintain myself.

Scope of work
• Build a lightweight blog theme (HTML, CSS, JavaScript or a static-site generator such as Jekyll/Hugo is fine) that matches the existing colour palette yet feels modern and readable.
• Add a newsletter sign-up form and connect it to a service such as Mailchimp or Sendinblue; the form must work on both desktop and mobile.
• Set up an easy publishing workflow—Markdown files pushed to GitHub and automatically deployed to GitHub Pages is ideal, but I am open to a simple CMS layer if that keeps editing friction-free.
• Optimise for SEO basics (meta tags, sitemap, fast page load, alt text).
• Deliver clear instructions in a short README so I can add new posts, update the newsletter link, and modify styles without touching every file.

Acceptance criteria
1. Each published post appears on an index page and its own dedicated page.
2. Newsletter sign-up successfully stores addresses in the chosen service’s list.
3. Site passes Google Lighthouse mobile and desktop performance audits with a score of 90+ for Performance and Accessibility.
4. All source code and assets are committed to the existing GitHub repository, ready to deploy on GitHub Pages without extra configuration.

If another framework or tooling approach will achieve the same results more efficiently, mention it in your bid; I am flexible on the stack so long as the final experience is fast, responsive, and simple for me to maintain.