lukeonline - React Edition

I’ve not been doing an awful lot with this website over the last few months. My placement work takes up the larger part of the week, and to be completely honest I find little energy to do any of my own stuff on the weekends.

That being said, my placement HAS given me the oppurtunity to learn a fair bit about front-end frameworks, and I decided it was finally time to draw a line over the messy, inconsistent, inaccessible site this once was and re-build it from the ground up using something a bit-more modern, like React, for example.

The previous site had a fair few issues. My stylesheet was one I had built up over the course of about six years, with chunks of it copied-and-pasted from previous projects. Naming conventions were inconsistent. Heaps of duplicate markup. Unfinished/abandoned areas. The list goes on.

Following the migration, things suddenly feel a whole-lot fresher. I’ve even tweaked some of the components to look a little flatter and easier on the eyes. I also tweaked the photo browser. Keyword search felt a bit pointless, so it’s gone. I still need to implement sorting, but for now it’s still fully functional, and I’m happy with how it’s turned out.

Eventually I plan to implement something like tailwindcss to make things even cleaner, as I do find myself leaning slightly into less-organised-than-would-be-preferable stylesheets, but it’s still a huge improvement, and I’m really loving working on expanding my knowledge of more maintainable and up-to-date front-end frameworks.

While I’m confident that the site looks and feels sufficient, I’m near-certain there will be a few issues popping-up here and there. If you do spot something, let me know about it!

So long!