Groundwork

I've finally cleared my plate of all other tasks and on to working solely on my freelance project. Nearly a month ago at this point, my aunt contacted me to see if I might be interested in doing some work on their website. Her and my uncle have a small business in San Francisco that does appraisals on commercial real estate. The website has some impressive styling elements, but as far as getting into some complex JavaScript, that won't be too necessary. The homepage consists of a scrolling hero image with a little bit of information below that. They have an about page that goes into some depth about them and their business, but is pretty basic, as of now. Their portfolio page is a very simple grid right now, with clickable images of 15 of their appraised structures that pop up a modal when clicked up. They have a latest news page which needs some serious work. Then, they have a very simple contact page to wrap it up. Again, most of these individual pages can be done fairly easily, but some of them are going to take a little more expertise. They are all manageable, but there's an extra layer of pressure since she's family and I definitely don't want to disappoint.

When first given the task, I realized right away that it was initially written with a Wordpress theme. Given what they were trying to do, this is totally fine and makes sense. They don't need a super fancy, complicated website, so why not just do it in Wordpress? Well, right away I could tell how slow the actual site was, and I believe this is due to being based in Wordpress. Between pages, the load time was well over a second. They don't get a lot of traffic to their site and this may not seem that important to them, but that load time is what will cause users and speculators to lose interest and move on before they've captured the information they want to from their site. Initially, I thought this would be a great place to implement Gatsby, due to its incredibly fast nature. I still think this would be great, but given there really isn't that much going on with the site, I think React will work just as good. I love Gatsby, but there's still a lot I need to learn about all of the ecosystem involved with it. The plugins used in Gatsby are expansive, and it would be easy to get bogged down in that and lose focus of just creating the website. I actually got a good start with the site using Gatsby, but then decided in the last week to stick to what I know. I now have a really nice start on the React site and am much more in my element.

So far, I've created the beginnings of the contact page and have scaffolded out the grid for the portfolio. Right now, I have an interesting rendition of a grid, but I really want to tinker with it to add some more asymmetry to it. I think this could really create some intrigue to this page and make it pop. The most difficult of all the pages to implement is going to be the latest news page, given its current state. I think I'm going to have to come up with a completely different design for this. As of now, it looks like there's about 3 news articles stuffed onto one row with a couple of columns of articles going down the page. When looking at this page, it's really overwhelming and there's a lot of information to take in. If I could cut it down to one column and stack the articles, I think it would look a lot better. This might not be the most unique design, but there's no sense in reinventing the wheel on this one. I think the idea would be to make it appear to be like a blog, with the articles scrolling down. Overall, on all of the pages, I want to take the written information down to a minimum. If a user wants to read something, I think they should get a brief overview and then they can click through to the article or the rest of the information they're trying to retrieve. I think as it stands, it's a bit overwhelming and a lot to process. There's a lot of work to be done, but I'm starting to get rolling on it.

Until tomorrow!