This website is built to promote myself, show off my work, and provide a central point from which all of my projects, social media handles, and resume can be viewed. Built by me, for me.
This website was built using React.js and (originally) Bootstrap. Besides bootstrap, all css was written as modularized vanilla css. Media queries and pseudo-class selections (eg: :hover) are handled using js to swap css classes on the fly. The website has no backend, since a) there is no reason to have one, and b) that lets me host it on GitHub pages, which is real nice.
From a philosophy perspective, I should note that if I were building this website for a client, I would very likely forgo using React, since the overhead that this incurs is not really worth it for a website of this type. However, my secondary aim in creating this website, besides simply re-vamping my portfolio, was to practice using React, so I feel justified in using it here.
I do not consider myself a designer, so the goal here was never to show off my design chops, but nobody likes a crappy looking website, so I did my best. I always intended to do this as a single page website since that's very in right now and the rest I just figured out as I went along. Many thanks go to my great friend Rachel Bennick for tons of helpful input on the design. I'd also like to give a shout-out to Seb Kay, who does not know me, but from whose own website I drew a lot of inspiration.
I have updated the information on the website including the portfolio and resume. I have also added a "Current Work" as that seems relevant.
Additionally I made the decision to ditch Bootstrap because a) I now prefer Tailwind and find it a lot faster to develop with, and b) I was curious to see how quickly and easily I could make the switch on an existing website. I also removed react-bootstrap and replaced the single modal used on the site with a vanilla JS version that I had previously developed.
I had been practicing my accessible design patterns with previous updates to the site and was quite happy with how it turned out, however it is due to for another audit now that I've changed things up with the newest update.
While performance is just not really an issue so far, since the website is so small, I do intend to use it as practice for optimization eventually, so I will be looking into doing that, probably primarily focusing on lazy-loading.
Now that I have Tailwind installed, I should really go through and convert as much of the vanilla css as I can into Tailwind utilities, but everything works right now so that's pretty far down the list of priorities.