For the past few weeks we’ve been focused on setting up the Fiber Club website (fiber.club) with the technology that we will be using for creating the designer portal. This was an important step because this technology (NextJS) enables a faster website, better SEO, improved accessibility, and other improvements that will ultimately translate to a better experience for our users.
The existing Fiber Club website was ported over from a plain ReactJS web application to a NextJS application. This change alone reduced our initial load times by ~50% and resulted in more than 10k lines of code to be removed while maintaining the existing functionality.
We also automated the website deployment and added a CDN (content delivery network) so that no matter where you are in the world, the website should load sufficiently fast. While we were doing this, we also deployed the fibre.club domain, although no localization has been done.
Next up, we will set up a development domain and the designer sign-up process.