They say a week is a long time in the world of politics, but the pace of change in the field of web development is incomparable. The speed of change in the world of front end web development is often bewildering and difficult to keep up with. I put the finishing touches to my first site about eight months ago. It really does seem like a lifetime ago. It’s difficult to comprehend the difference in the way that site was built and how my new site was structured.
It’s gratifying to see a real demonstration of how much I’ve learnt in the past year. Thinking back to how I built my first site, I’m amazed by just how I made things difficult for myself. There were a large array of css files, each individually linked to the head of the HTML file. In fact there were no less than 18 CSS files. The main CSS file stretched to over 1,200 lines with the media queries placed at the bottom. The site was responsive……to a degree. Looking back it’s a wonder that working on the site didn’t lead me to the brink of insanity. I had made a token attempt to use SASS to try and bring a little order structure of the file system, but it was a half-hearted attempt at best.
It was a similar story with respect to my JavaScript files. Bloated files were linked to the master html file and plugins were used to perform simple actions which I could have coded myself. Images were not properly compressed and how the site would download successfully without a long delay, will always remain a mystery to me. The html file was made up of a vast collection of classes and ID’s which would have perplexed the most experienced web developer. It was frankly a mess.
For my new site, I used Gulp as my choice of build system. I minified my CSS and JavaScript files and all were concatenated into single CSS and JS files which are linked to my index html file. SASS has been used in a much more measured and structured way, which has helped to simplify my workflow greatly. Using media queries in each individual SCSS file has been a joy. Images have been compressed and I’m sure my site will download a lot quicker. CDN’s have been utilised where possible and using an autoprefixer has saved me a time and a fair degree of pain. The plumber plugin has helped deal with the inevitable errors and setting up a live server has further improved the speed of my workflow. And finally, with experience, my HTML file is now a lot leaner and semantic.
I have no doubt that in eight months from now, when I work on another refresh of my site, I’ll laugh at the primitive work environment I’ve set up. But for now, I’m enjoying coding a whole lot more than was the case during the start of the year. I hope you enjoying viewing my new site.