I Created a Film/Beer Blog

What

Film & Froth is a Film blog that focuses on the reaction towards a movie but also expanding on the beverage of choice during the viewing (a beer). Resulting in a fun pairing of Film, and you guessed it, Froth!

Why

A couple friends reached out to me for some help implementing an idea they had. Blogging about films but also the beer(s) they had while watching them, and then talking about their feelings towards the movie and the drink. Needless to say I was excited to try and put something together for them! Especially as this was my first real side-project.

How

Scrolling through the Dev.to like any other day I came across 5 full stack projects to add to your portfolio and saw something about a blog with GatsbyJS. I had never heard of that framework before so I was instantly drawn to it. Everything they say about GatsbyJS is true, its incredibly easy to start, use, and update! Not to mention it is incredibly fast. So I was able to put together a GatsbyJS project and populate it with whatever posts the writers send my way and deploy to Netlify (also incredibly easy).

Learnings

I've learned plenty about GatsbyJS and GraphQL queries, image optimization and most importantly the almighty SEO. I've never been a very good UI/UX designer so the tinkering of design will probably persist forever but I've had my fair share of learning moments with HTML and CSS, centering things is quite possibly the worst!

Throughout it all I am incredibly proud of the current status of the site and the results of the Lighthouse Audit is almost all green!!

What's Next?

I want to continue to learn more about design and having the site be more responsive, its mobile view is still pretty rough. Also not to be a perfectionist or anything but getting that Performance score higher would also be nice, especially given a Google ranking bump/punishment for performance.
Email subscription is another big function to add, using Google Analytics to check the traffic to the site I think having emails is a perfect way to bring back users in a convenient way.

Would love any feedback, questions, concerns, or anything in between!

Film & Froth: https://www.filmfroth.com