Start Date: April 17
End Date: April 19
Blog Post
I had the disadvantage of being short on time for this one, needing to complete the entire project in the space of an afternoon. As a result, I probably could have given this page more polish than I ended up giving it. On the other hand, I think the final product looks a little more solid (if somewhat plainer) than my last few attempts - I was careful to design around a 12-column grid, and made slightly better choices with my markup.
I'm not entirely sure what the concept for this page is. I suppose it's selling some kind of pet-related subscription service, but I didn't have much time to think through the fictional company's hypothetical business model when I was busy trying to piece the rest of the project together.
I was going to give the 11ty static site generator a try for this project, but I ended up not having enough time to learn the basics, and I didn't want to use a starter template for my first try. Instead, I just used plain HTML and CSS. My "tool chain" is a single Node script that exists solely to minify two files and copy some stuff to the public directory. ...and honestly, that was way simpler to set up than anything else I've configured this month. Certainly I'd want something more robust for more complex projects, but for small things like this, I feel like I might've been overthinking my build processes.
Remarks
The first step to solving any problem is to admit you have one. In that way, this project is a bit of a turning point for me. The landing page design itself is forgettable, but it's clear that I'm paying more attention to the layout than I had been previously, and there are no screen sizes for which the page is obviously broken. While there are a number of other issues with the page (the cards in particular could have been improved), the final product is clearly a step up from my previous attempt.
Even a few weeks on, I'm still thinking about the "build script" I wrote in Node to prepare the project for deployment. It doesn't do much at all, only minifying a few files and copying images across directories. Most of the heavy lifting is done by the NPM packages. What sticks with me the most, though, is the fact that this script is correct, and produced the exact same output an unconfigured Parcel.js or Webpack would have. Either of those would have allowed me to accomplish more in less time, but they aren't letting me do anything I couldn't already do myself.
It's difficult to explain exactly how much I needed this bit of perspective. But if that was the only thing I took away from this month, with all of its frustrations, it would have been worth it.