This is my fifth major rebuild of the IPM free online resource, and my first non-Wordpress version! This site gets millions of visitors a year, from all over the world (over 200 countries), and serves countless downloads of .PDFs and other resources.
I rebuilt the site from the ground up to make it:
- ⌨️ More accessible (for everyone, but especially blind and low vision people, as well as non-mouse keyboard users)
- 🚰 Less resource-intensive, reducing the average page weight (in MB) by about 90% (for the climate, and for people around the world with limited bandwidth)
- 🔐 More secure (hacking has always been a problem with this site, and my sites in general -- no more!)
- 🏎 Faster (cuz who's just sitting around with 2 extra full seconds for an article to load, amiright?)
- 🗺 Easier to navigate, find & download what you want, and see what new stuff I've published since you last visited (local storage to the rescue!)
- 🤑 Affordable to host (with the traffic this site gets, I was paying $400 - $800 per month for managed Wordpress hosting. Big oof.)
- 🔮 Completely open source (you can see all content and all the code that powers the web app in this repository, and you're welcome to use it to build your own site!)
And I succeeded 💯 Here's the Google Lighthouse Audit Scores for this version of IPM:
Want to help out? Please submit pull requests with...
- 📝 Edits! Fix typos, content errors, or even suggest a rewrite to make a section of an article more readable.
- 🌏 Translations! Create a new markdown file and prepend the two-letter country code of the language you're translating it into before the .md (e.g., about.fr.md to translate the About page into French)
- 🐞 Bug fixes! Noticing something wonky on the front-end? Have an easy fix? I'd love the help. I barely know how any of this stuff works.
- ♿️ Accessibility improvements! Is there a better way to do something? Did I forget alt text where I should really have included it? Please help me help everyone use this site.
- The cabal of a11y/accessibility activists who checked in on this site build progress from July - November 2019 as I was creating it from the ground up, giving me regular feedback and constructive criticism to make the site the most accessible it's ever been
- My secret beta tester group who provided me tons of insight on the new design and structure of the site
- Jake Archibald and his SVG optimization GUI https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/. I spent hours in there making my gradients just so, and was able to reduce my data footprint considerably.
- Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks.com. Always the first place I go if I'm unsure of how to solve a front-end problem.
- WebAIM and all their accessibility pointers and resources, like the contrast checker. Wouldn't have gotten that 100 accessibility score without their guidance.
- The Hugo Community and bep for their helpfulness, troubleshooting, and guidance in learning a new SSG.