We recently just rebuilt our entire website in Gatsby and Tailwind. The reason? Our last website sucked.
The original website was written in Pure HTML and optimized with Parcel, which led to more headaches than benefits. We thought that doing this would make the website fast, but in reality, we were just shooting ourselves in the foot.
Our new website was rewritten from the ground up. All of the data on the site is served from JSON files, allowing for us to add new projects, team members, and partnerships within minutes. The best part? It has better SEO than our last interation.
Check out the website here, and the Github repository here
Speedy Libraries Are Fast
When Gatsby branded itself as a fast, efficient, and search-optimized, I didn't believe them. I thought it was just another react-based library doing the same things. So, we built the first website in pure HTML because we thought it would be faster. But, it wasn't.
So, when people say that fast things are fast, they usually are.
Make Life Easy, Not Hard
We really made our life hard when we decided to do pure-HTML. Adding new pages would take days, changing text would require navigating through thousands of lines of code, etc. Now, a ton of our pages are written with DSG in mind. This means that the data in our JSON files can create thousands of pages in seconds.
Get Help from the Community
The biggest take-away that we got from this relaunch was using the community to our advantage. We created tons of issues on Github, and had a lot of community involvement. If we didn't do this, the website wouldn't be a fraction as awesome as it is now.
Give us some feedback!
We would love to hear your comments and concerns about the new website, so feel free to comment down below or create new issues on the Github page (We have a better chance of hearing you if you leave an issue on Github though).
Top comments (5)
Feel free to leave comments to let us know how you felt about the website!
So wait, isn't HTML just one big binary tree? How in the world does it manage to be slow???
It was more of Parcel that was slowing down the rendering, but overall the biggest downside of HTML was the speed of development. We just couldn't put out as much content each week as we are now with our old deployment.
What's Parcel? Edit : Googling. That was a silly question, lol.
Lol– I just saw this.