I recently dipped my toes into the React/Next.js waters for the first time to build a little personal project. I wrote about how I used AI to help me with that recently, and I'll do another post about the project in more depth soon. For this post though, I wanted to write about a few of the gotchyas I encountered while working on the project that I thought it might be useful to document in case others run into similar problems.
Well, not really. But it's all about click-baity headlines these days, isn't it? So while, yes, this article will be about AI, it's not going to be about food, but about code (sorry sandwich afionados).
If you're a conscientious web developer you make sure when you update static assets, like CSS and javascript, that your site forces a visitor to download a fresh copy with the updated code in it. This is otherwise known as cache-busting.
On quite a few projects recently I've been using a front-end tooling approach as described in the excellent article by Andrew Welch of nystudio107, A Gulp Workflow for Frontend Development Automation. I first got drawn to it because I've also been using Tailwind for most of my recent work, and found that Andrew has a repo for a Craft CMS scaffolding project on Github which is aso set up to use Tailwind.
Since I first wrote a review of Processwire more than six years ago, I've gone on to be an active user of the CMS and have used it on quite a few sites over the years. If you do a search for favourite your-preferred-cms plugins/modules/add-ons
, you'll get a lot of results, but there doesn't appear to be anything that's been written for Processwire, other than a forum thread which is a few years old now.
It's only taken four and a bit years, but I finally got around to updating ExpressionEngine on this site. The site was running 2.11.9 and it's now on the latest version, 5.2.4. The main reason for the upgrade was because the way I had been dealing with images and code in blog posts wasn't ideal, it wasn't very flexible or user-friendly when creating content, and on the front end, the output wasn't responsive enough.
Haven't heard of Local by Flywheel? It's a web development tool for managing server environments that was designed to be used with Wordpress, but can easily be used for Craft, ExpressionEngine, Processwire or any Content Management System (CMS).
I am often asked: "How much does a website cost?" And the response is usually along the lines of, "There's no one single answer to that question, it will depend on what you want, and it will vary from one project to the next."
So you're in the market for some creative services, whether it be a new or redesigned website, a marketing strategy, advertising or printed material. You may also have an idea about what sort of options you have to choose from: you could choose a creative agency or studio, or a freelancer.
But what exactly is the difference between the two?
More on What’s the difference between a freelancer and an agency? →
The claims sound great: "Create your stunning website. It's free." "Create a Free Website, Online Store, or Blog." "A simple & elegant website builder (and it's free)." And given that this is a blog about web design and development, and these sorts of companies are in direct competition with us, you might be thinking that all I'm trying to do is run down the competition to make us look better.