This is a website for my Business, FNBG Business Cost Consultants, and was what led me to my interest in web development.
As part of starting the business there are all sorts of things that you need to get set-up, and one of the most important, I felt, was a website.
My business site started its life as a Google Site which, as anyone who has used the service will know, has severe limitations. The frustrations grew as the site, although functional, was far from easy on the eye. In addition to this, at a time when mobile and tablet browser use were on the rise, the site was a calamity.
I started to learn HTML and CSS and proceeded to create my first static site.
Over the last couple of years I have implemented Twitter Bootstrap, some PHP includes for ease of management / maintenance, as well as a little AJAX for requesting additional content while keeping the initial page size low and requesting content from my (shamefully out-of-date) Blogger Site.
The most recent version of the site was written using a static site generator called Metalsmith allowing me to create dynamically generated website pages and use build tools such as SCSS, whilst getting the speed and security benefits of a static website.
I removed Bootstrap and wrote all the css using flexbox to create a responsive layout which reduced the size of the resources required on page load in my search for fast load times.
I also took a step onto Progressive Web Apps (PWA) which enabled even faster page load times as well as the ability to work offline (probably a little over the top for a site like this but good to try out).
