Where to start?

Now I've decided what tech I want to use, but where do I start? Starting off a project always seems daunting, especially when you've never used the technologies before, but I find that a good tutorial can get you up to grips and feeling confident quickly.

The Initial Setup

The first thing I did was find a good tutorial on how to use Gatsby, and read through it. I didn’t actually code it out, since it was well written and easy to follow. However, once I’d done this, I did go back and do the initial Gatsby setup. I then followed this tutorial to connect it to Netlify, and got my basic ‘Hello World’ page deploying.

Styling

I then wanted to get some basic styling out of the way, so I added some Sass files which I’d found online (the links to which can be found at the top of the files, and on the credits page of my site). I then tried using them to create a hero banner on my homepage, just to get used to how they worked. I also used this article to help me implement dark mode, so I didn’t have to stare at a light screen whilst developing!

Adding Content

The next stage was setting up the CMS. I followed this tutorial by Okta on how to connect Netlify CMS to a Gatsby site, and set up a basic blog. I went ahead and followed this, and along the way created my articles and blog pages, which is what you're reading this on now! I also added widgets to show these on the home screen. They're not perfectly designed, but I just wanted to get a work-in-progress to check I could get content flowing through the site.

I then went ahead and wrote some blog entries, followed by adding in my project and also writing my first article. I chose these three content types to have in the CMS since they're the only things I'll be adding frequently. Things like the 'About Me' page won't have to change too often, however now I know how easy it is to use the CMS, I may try and export as much data to it as I can in order to make the site as easy to update as possible.

Next time...

Now that I have a basic structure setup, I want to add as much content as possible to the CMS, and then start to design the site!