This project was a typical promotional website built for Ken Wilson, a traditional folk singer and pencil sketch artist.
Challenges & Requirements
There were two key aspects to the project, firstly to promote Ken as folk singer and artist, and secondly to facility the sale of his art prints online.
As a personal project to help a family member get online the emphasis for me was on minimising costs while building the site as quickly and efficiently as possible. The site also needed a CMS system to allow Ken to manage the website content going forward.
Since he wanted to be able to sell online, it would also need integratiing with a payment provider in order to take online payments. Due to time-constraints and the need for simplicity, PayPal Button's fit the bill perfectly.
Actions & Outcomes
- Static Site Generator. Offers unparalleled performance metrics out of the box. With a background in Vue.js my Static Site Generator of choice is Gridsome.
- Content Management. Using Netlify CMS we're able to create static content using a customisable WYSIWIG to create and edit Markdown files.
- Hosted. With Netlify's free-tier hosting static websites the projects ongoing costs were kept extremely low.
- Online Payments. Fulfilled using Paypal Button's, the Vue.js front-end could be configured to offer Users options such as Canvas, Poster, and print size relatively easily.
Conclusions
Having heard a lot about the benefits of Static Site Generators I used this project as an opportunity to learn more. With a background in Vue.js it made perfect sense to try out Gridsome, a static site generator built with Vue.js.
It's fair to say I was blown away by the ease with which you can create a dynamic website like this. Particularly when combined with Vue's Single-Page Components and Tailwind CSS' atomic css classes.
As a result of the benefits I saw whilst building this project I championed the use of the JAM stack in my day job at Visualsoft. As a result, I was very quickly put to work building Visualsoft's public facing Roadmap website.
It also lead to me doing a presentation at Visualsoft's monthly internal Front-end talks called A Vue to a kill(er pipeline).