About this site

The thing about developing a website in Gatsby with a Headless CMS like Strapi is that there is a lot to learn when it comes to developing tehcnology.

For both platforms you develp everything on your own local host machine (a PC or MAC) something I used to do when I was first starting out in web development back in the 1990s. Then you need to upload your code via Github (or something similar) and connect the backend of Strapi to Gatsby's front end. Not trivial either if you've never done it before.

You have to understand the architecture of development and understand code. It's very much not like Wordpress.

So why bother?

Site speed

Speed is the key when it comes to Google search rankings. Now I don't even expect to be able to rank on Google with a super slick fast website either because I don't have the content to compete. However I know that if I score above 95 on mobile and desktop I can advise other people how to do it too. They then might rank.

25000 products

The other thing is that I need to develop another website in Gatsby that does have the content (25000 pages actually and growing daily). Each product might have 10 images associated with it. That makes it a helluva job to optimise for Google for different screen sizes unless you use a react based platform. Gatsby is that platform. So this small website is practice for a bigger more difficult challenge.

Analytics

Data, Data, Data. I want a modern analytics stack installed. One that can capture customer information and enrich it over time in a manner that is completely privacy compliant with all the GDPR requirements. Again it's not this site that is important for that as I am not personally going to track customers here. However I need to understand how the building blocks are put in place in a tool like Gatsby.

Freelancing

Finally I thought I could stay working at the tech side of the business by learning how the tech works. By developing this website I got the capability to do strong performance websites, at a large scale, well tracked in a privacy compliant way and had fun while doing it. So I can freelance on your case if you need help. I have worked with some of the best people in the world in digital production, advertising, marketing and analytics.

I very much want to be able to continue in this vein, building out advanced customer data products for new and old customers alike.