Lessons learned from coding TM Conference website

Recently I was less active on my blog mainly because I had a lot of side projects that I was doing. Today I want to share with you lessons learned from doing one.

Wroclaw LevelUp conference website

I was asked by my friend from local Wrocław toastmasters to prepare a simple website for a local conference. As I was starting out in HTML & CSS world I saw this as an opportunity to be better in those areas. As I was progressing through I learned a couple of lessons that I want to share with you.

Lesson 1 - don’t try to reinvent the wheel

It may seem that this saying for this section was said 100x times but I say it one more time. When I decided to do this website, first I ask my friend if this needs a dynamic data. It wasn’t so I picked stack: plain HTML & CSS. I could use bootstrap or tailwindcss but I don’t and it kicked me later.

At the beginning everything was fine - I was writing my CSS as usual but then I found out that I need to support both mobile & desktop screen resolutions. Writing media queries in plain CSS was a tricky and even me - author of the code started to get lost. Not to mention auto-prefixing.

Next time I will start with some existing frameworks or components and then build from that.

Lesson 2 - CMSing

I was fortunate that my friend has some coding knowledge so he could easily change or add some pieces of content to the website. If not him I have to do it by myself which was proven to be a bit flustrating when you have a pile of text to write.

Lesson 3 - Static websites

I learned that doing this website as a static was a good idea - I don’t have a backend to be worried about, my page is loading fast and it is plain HTML. Next time I will use static websites + CMS to handle such job.

Summary

During this project, I learned a couple of lessons that for sure help me during another side projects. What about you? Have you ever learned such lessons from your own projects? Btw my website is [here](Level Up Wrocław