My Portfolio Website

There's nothing more satisfying than learning new things. So with desperately needing a new portfolio website and having more free time due to the Covid pandemic I decided to get stuck in and learn some new technologies. I had two objectives for the website:

• Aesthetically pleasing
• Fast load speeds

After researching various options, I chose GastbyJS as my front-end because it's a static site generation framework which would give the website the optimised speed I was looking for. The next decision I had to make was to choose something for the back-end. Over the years I've created numerous WordPress websites so I wanted to try something different. I stumbled upon an open-source headless CMS called Strapi which sounded perfect for the job, so that was that decision made.

By following the extensive documentation provided by GatsbyJS and Strapi, as well as the help of a few Youtube tutorials, I managed to develop a functional website that used GastbyJS as the front-end and Strapi as the back-end along with an API to connect the two. Once I had a functional site that met the speed objective it was time to complete the other objective of making it look good. GastbyJS has a plugin to automatically compile Sass so I decided to write the stylesheet using Sass as it has some nifty features, such as variables, which facilitate development.

I kept the design simple, both in terms of looks and functionality, and in my mind satisfies the objective of being aesthetically pleasing so I'm happy with the end result!