Recently, I've been looking into stuff I can do between my first year of university ending, and my second year actually starting. Barring any exam-related interruptions (and COVID!), I thought it'd be a really neat idea to go ahead with a plan I've had for a while to produce my own website!

As I've said, I had plans to construct one of these a very long time - having the ideas to construct one probably about a year ago now; but I never had the time (nor the commitment) necessary to actually do the job. But now I have both the time and nothing to do with it, so about two weeks to a month ago - I started doing my research.

Inspirations

The main inspirations I had for my website, and the technologies powering it, come from my university society, CSS. A few of their events involved technologies like ReactJS and Redux and I remember being particularly interested in how React worked and seemed to make JS a lot simpler than just writing raw JavaScript, HTML and CSS like people did back in the 'good old days'. Now, that sdidn't mean that it was easy to do - but any attempt to make website programming easier than it normally is taught at GCSE and A-Level is a helpful and handy thing to do, especially to relative newcomers like myself!

In addition, one of the people directly involved in a lot of events at both CSS and AFNOM, Justin Chadwell has a fantastic website that utilises some of these things directly! After looking at his site, and realising that CSS frameworks like Bulma exist and that web deployment and React frameworks like Gatsby also exist, I chose to use these somewhat more modern frameworks that make website creation (somewhat) simple whilst also providing flexiblity and modularity.

Moral of the story? Ask people who've done this stuff before - they'll recommend some fantastic technologies.

Deployment and Thoughts

I've started with Github Pages for now - it's simple and easy to do and whilst there are other providers out there like Netlify that I've looked at (due to other developers in my circle also using that!) I really just wanted a no non-sense method of website deployment. I'll probably end up switching off of Github Pages at a later date, but for now it suits me just fine.

This website is messy - very messy. The code is all over the place and there's probably about a hundred and one things catastrophically wrong with it; but I'm proud of what I've made. I'm sure some people will say that "It's very easy to do the things you've done!" but I'm a newcomer to this whole thing, and for my first real web project ever I'm real happy with it.

All in all, I think I'll keep working on this stuff - it's a vital part of frontend development that I've not really done before, and despite all my teachers letting me know I'll need to learn HTML, CSS and JS for my exams (that didn't happen), the technologies I've used have never really popped up in my life before. The source code is available HERE if you're so inclined to take a looksie.