First published on SimplestWeb.in
Hi All,
It's that time of the year when we celebrate Diwali here in India. I had a few days time all for myself, so I decided to rebuild portfolio site. The old site was a single HTML page it has my services, my projects, a few lines about myself and my contact info at the end. Pretty basic, nothing fancy. It was enough to grab the attention people and let them know who I was.
What did I want in the new site
- A bit more space to talk about Me
- Adding new Projects
- Same for Services (changes from time to time)
- Since I started writing more often, I wanted a blog too
- And a dynamic contact form
I can hear you say, this is a perfect use case of WordPress. But me being me, I chose the shortest possible way and built my own mini-cms. I know this is not much and can build it with ease on WordPress. The thing is I hate customizing WordPress. Every attempt at creating a WordPress theme or a plugin have failed. I can already sense some of you nodding in confirmation. So I decided to build it with Laravel. I know the framework well enough, I have used it on some of my client's projects and I love how elegant it is to use.
Why I chose to use Laravel
- Developer Friendly
- Can have control over the tiniest of details
- I know the framework inside out
- Built-in Authentication
- Built-in Caching
For a WordPress developer, this list may not be convincing enough to make the switch and build a CMS. But for me, Laravel was an obvious choice because I work with it day in, day out. I never knew where this would go when I started, but it turned out better than expected. I am quite happy for a day's work, though there's room for a lot of improvements, you know what? those can wait.
This is my new site SimplestWeb.in, take a look and let me know what you think and how you might improve it.
That's all for now. Thanks.
P.S. If you would like to know the technical details or like tutorial let me know. I could write a follow-up article discussing only the technical side of it.