Before jumping into the nitty gritty of what is powering my site. I want to talk first about my goals with this website. This project was not a simple weekend project, it probably could have been if I was more organized with it but that is for another post. When I first sat down and decided I wanted to revise my website I had a few major goals in mind.

Goals:

Blog
Contact Page
About Me
Portfolio
Resume

These in the grand scheme of things are pretty simple, and most personal websites have these but I wanted the site to be different. I want to be proud of what I made so I didn't have to rip it down in a month or two and re-do this again, like I have before. Instead I wanted to take more time and be more focused to detail, make sure the website worked on various mobile devices, make sure the website was assessible to screen readers, etc.

Now on my previous itterations of this project I looked at a lot of different frameworks, both frontend and backend. For example, Ghost, Jekyll, and even DJANGO. What I knew is with my site I wanted it to be light weight/fast, I wanted it to be lost cost, and I wanted it to be something new.

So that is what landed me on this cocktail, the site is currently using Gridsome for the backend, with various amounts of plug-ins I will talk about those a little later.

Gridsome

Let's take a moment here to chat about Gridsome, what is it? Why I used it? Gridsome is a Vue.JS framework that is focused on fast right out of the gate. This already is checking a box for my requirements that I spoke about earlier. After continuing to dig into Gridsome I noticed it had a large plugin library which tells me its already well adopted and maintained which is obviously important.

Mobile Testing

So my biggest thing is accessbility and responsibility, I want my site to be accessible and easy to use. So at first when digging into testing on different mobile tools and resultions I found a lot of expensive suites for a small site project. So then I came across this amazing Google chrome plug-in Mobile Browser Emulator. To me this was more than enough it's not automated or anything but it helps save time and that is more than enough.

# blog

Let's chat about this FrancisPBaker.com..