Personal Website and Portfolio
This project is by far the most extensive and well developed of all my personal projects. I intended this website to showcase my skills and abilities to potential employers and to prove to myself that the time I put into learning how to code and work with Web Development technologies had paid off. I did not want to limit this website to a purely professional purpose, but to also show a little more of who I am as a person. Tackling this project was not easy, as it involved learning JavaScript, studying HTML and CSS, learning about React components and hooks, as well as the web development framework Next.js.
React and Next.js
I had first learned about React in my web development focussed bootcamp, but applying knowledge in a personal project always brings about new and unexpected challenges. The possibility to create reusable components and to reduce the amount of pure HTML by implementing React features is certainly one of its big advantages. Next.js takes this a step further and provides one with a structure to work in. While working on this project I managed to create a multi-page website within the structure of Next.js and implement my knowledge of React hooks and components.
Styling and Interactivity
I only started to truly understand how crucial styling is when I started tackling this project. If a website or an application is to be deployed, it doesn't just need to work - it needs to be intuitive and fun to use. While I was always more interested in how to make things work, as opposed to making them look good, I now understand that in web development these aspects go hand in hand. I therefore drew up a simple design and structure for my website and tried to keep it simple, while also implementing aspects like the image-based navigation and limiting text-elements to aspects of the site where they are strictly necessary. First tests revealed the advantages of an additional text based mode of intra-site-navigation and I decided to include an animated hamburger menu for this purpose.
