I recently finished building and hosting my personal website. My goal was to keep the website static, clean, and fast. In order to make sure that I was following the best practices, I was also trying to achieve that perfect Lighthouse score.
Here are a few details about the technologies I used:
Next.js
- I knew that selecting the right tools to build a website can be a key to optimizing SEO performance. Since I was building a personal website, I knew I had to use a static site generator. I also wanted to add a blog section that used the DEV.to as a CMS to retrieve my blog-posts. So I knew there was a dynamic aspect to my website as well.
- Using Next.js was a no-brainer since it was the perfect solution for my problem and an added bonus was that I was already comfortable with it.
Tailwind
- As much as I hated using Tailwind on my first project and thought that I'd never continue using this utility framework for any of my further projects, I'm pleasantly surprised to say that this is my third project with Tailwind, and I cannot imagine doing any design work without it.
- I have already made a post about my favorite component libraries using Tailwind and used some of the components from Kutty for this project as well.
Typescript
- This was a pain to learn. For someone who's self-taught and has only worked with JavaScript, I could not see why anyone would spend so much time defining types for every single element or component. However, as soon as I started importing data from DEV.to APIs, I got it. I did not face a single
cannot read property of undefinederrors and just for that, I am willing to learn and improve my TS skills.
Things I like:
- Having a good Lighthouse Score was of prime importance to me, given that this website is an online representation of me as a developer and will potentially be seen by recruiters and fellow developers alike. I am planning to make a separate post about how I achieved the score, but it's fair to say that I am pretty happy with the result.
- I also like the minimalist and clean design. I was planning to add some animations using Framer-Motion but then decided against it, since I wanted to deploy rather than spend another week learning a new technology that I didn't plan on implementing in the first place.
- Google Analytics helps me monitor the web traffic
- Dark Mode only!😎
Things I wish to improve upon:
- Add a custom domain name
- I need to add my resume
- Fix some minor bugs in my projects
- Add a copy e-mail functionality to my 'Say Hello' button instead of opening a new blank window
- Add Canonical URLs to my blog page
- Add a comment section at the bottom of every blog page that redirects the user to the specific article on DEV.to.
- Syntax highlight the markdown blogs
Feel free to visit the website. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how I can improve it and I'm very much open to constructive criticism!
Top comments (67)
With regards to people bashing on the tech stack used, the design, etc. You do you!
And give yourself a pat on the back for deploying something and trying out new tools. Congrats on trying new stuff and learning along the way. Next is a great choice 👍
Thank you mate! Appreciate the kind words. 😊
Awesome website man !
I built my portfolio using Gatsby and after trying Next.js for past few months, I'm planning to migrate to Next. Is this project open sourced? If it is, please provide github link.
github.com/prnvbirajdar/Personal-W...
Here you go buddy!
I'd also suggest you go through my previous post. It has a lot of resources for using Next.js to build a blog.
dev.to/prnvbirajdar/list-of-resour...
Man I love this! I am building a website for my sister and was learning next.js to make a static website that pulled her wordpress blog data.
Thanks!
Thanks mate ! Will check it out.
How would you compare the two? Of corse it's a no-brainer if you need backend, but what a out strictly SSR-stuff?
I think Gatsby is great for SSG since it has tons of plugins specifically catering SSG apps. However there's an added complexity of GraphQL. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
From what I have heard and read, Gatsby is entering the Server Side Rendering game as well.
If you look at the NPM downloads though, Next is king rn!
Gatsby doesn't have that much complexity in GraphQL stuffs. Everything is built in you just have to query the stuffs you need in GraphQL playground. Infact found it quite easier to work with.
But the build time of Gatsby is too slow. And the caching isn't that great so you need to restart server time to time which is quite annoying.
Gatsby 3.0 has been released recently which is believed to be quite faster, but haven't migrated to that yet.
You could improve on accessibility what lighthouse could not catch.
e.g. your menu toggle button is not toggeling aria-expanded
or you have tabindex=0 on a div around your logo link. The link itself has by default tabindex=0. Use p (block) or span (inline) tags for text elements.
Thank you for the feedback. I totally forgot about the menu toggle accessibility. Nice catch!
This is some good looking website.
For Blog page, I would recommend to make the Post card bit bigger with more excerpt. and publish date below title (as it is not the important info here)
For Projects, I would recommend to align the project image to right side (alternate end of the text content)
For domains, checkout Bigrock (.com for INR 399 via affiliate bigrock-in.sjv.io/c/1658967/101690...) guessing that you can buy domain in India
Otherwise google, namechap, netlify, cloudflre offer good price on domain names.
Let me know if you need some help setting up.
Just some things I noticed.
besides that, 👍!
Sorry, I did not understand the first remark.
Dark grays, got it!
Yeah, I am in process of adding a light theme. Many folks suggested that.
On pranav-birajdar.vercel.app/about
I have still black space below your footer because the content is not long enough.
Have a look at e.g. css-tricks.com/couple-takes-sticky...
Thanks! I got what you're saying. I'll get on it!
I highly doubt 100% Performance is real. I'm on 16c/32t cpu with 12 SSDs RAID 10 and my LOCALHOST tests always float around 95-97%, usually the "Largest Contentful Paint" is the culprit. This happens even when everything is loaded from RAM drive
Anyway the 100% at first 4 Lighthouse circles of hell is somewhat easily achievable without 3rd party libraries - vanilla HTML+CSS+JS. Last year me and a couple of coworkers did a small competition where the goal was to do that below 2 hours ... All of us hit it at around 1:10-15h with average site size 4-5 times smaller and logic error-free excluding some typos in the code. Our conclusion was that the coder will definitely waste more time in setting up the machine for the tests (installing and configuring OS + web-server + database) than coding a site with 100% Lighthouse score from the scratch
I know these scores don't mean much. But I've been told that recruiters sometimes check, and it kinda looks good to have a decent score.
Most of my other projects hover in the 90s and I'm okay with that. It's decent enough.
Great portfolio and awesome on the 100% LH score! Your site is one of the best portfolio I’ve seen in terms of usability, responsive design, and overall layout. Love the process you went by in debugging and learning different tech/languages and figuring out what works best for you! 🙌🏼
Thank you so much! Yes, it took me a while to figure out all the kinks but I'm satisfied with the result and glad that so many devs from the community loved it!
Congratulations Paranav!
Nicely done, I digged the minimalistic approach and the attention to subtle details.
Despite what other mentioned here's what I think.
First, you shouldn't aim to have a perfect score. It does not always reflect a usuable website. I didn't do my homework yet but I bet that none of the most used and visited websites have a perfect score. Yet they are usable and performant.
My second point is related to first one which is having a dark mode only. You mentioned it as a powerful feature. It may be unpopular but dark mode it does not always improve the readability. Personally, it worsen dramatically my reading experience. I start to see all texts doubled. I was having this issue lately for months. I've discovered by chance that I can read better in white background. After, changing all my IDEs and OS hence the visited website to light mode I started to feel much better. So that could be considered an issue in term of accessibility and usability.
Lastly, in recent projects boxes the hover does not behave the same as in the previous section. I've tried with phone vut when I hold tap in the box the blue background does not fill the entire box.
Also consider using theme-color meta tag it would make it neater for phone users.
Keep the good work and never stop improving yourself. Good luck!
Really good suggestions. Thank you for all the feedback. I'll definitely look into adding a light theme, since many folks mentioned that.
I'll also look into the mobile experience of the website. Thanks again!
Hm, modesty and humbleness!
"I am a software developer building beautiful interfaces and accessible applications."
The dark mode alone is painful to my eyes.
Yeah, I'm thinking of adding a toggle button to switch the theme.
Good one!
Thank you Pawan!
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