v7.2.0

The site is now ready for production!

In a mad dash to finish the site by the end of February, there have been a plethora of changes to get ready. 140 commits worth of changes, in fact. All in the span of 12 days.

It's been a long road, but it's done. The deadline has been met, and the finished product is live. Now it's time to take a step back and list off the all the changes since the last release:

Site

• Added a Contact page. Features a pretty slick contact form.
• Added an introduction on the homepage.
• Added links for projects that have public sites. GitHub repos for projects, game pages for Roblox, and published websites for web design.
• Changed the main image for Snowy Mountain. We're now showing off the standing stone. It draws attention much more than the mountain overview.

Styles

• Grouped component styles with their components. All styling for components now lives right along side the components. This makes everything a lot easier to work with, as we no longer need to go back and forth between our JSX and CSS folders.
• Merged base element styling into a single file. Styles for img, h1-h6, etc. has all been combined into a single file. Our styling on the base HTML elements isn't very long, so having everything split up doesn't give many benefits.
• Added Neat to manage our grids.
• Removed Toast in favor of Neat.
• Added FontAwesome for icons.
• Expanded content width to 960px. Up from 800px.
• Added breakpoints so the site looks good on mobile.
• Split vendor styles to their own bundle.
• Added a slider to project pages. All the images are now contained in a single space, instead of being stacked on top of each other.
• Added a slight box-shadow to project tiles and slider images.
• Styled the Portfolio page.
• Styled the About page.
• Styled project tiles.
• Styled the navigation.
• Styled headings. Added a nice little underline.
• Changed width to max-width on the wrapper. This makes the content shrink when the page is resized.
• Switched to a lighter text color.
• Removed huge padding at the top of headings.
• Removed unused global variables.
• Removed unused Sass partials.
• Removed the commented inuitcss partials in main.scss.

Images

Note: "project images" refers to the images that are used in the slider on each project's page.

• Changed project images to share a standard resolution. Before, the resolutions were varied. Some were 16:9, others were closer to 4:3. Images now share a standard size of 960x540.
• Converted project images to JPG from PNG.
• Drastically reduced combined image filesize. Lowering the resolution of all the images to 960x540, along with converting them to JPG has given us some crazy huge filesize decreases. We've gone from a whopping 47mb of combined images, down to a measly 1.5mb.
• Moved the favicon into the root. The site's favicon is the only image we have left after grouping the project images with their projects. It doesn't warrant a dedicated folder, so it's been moved to the root.
• Fixed accidental white line at the bottom of Mirage Isle's boat screenshot.

JavaScript

• Fixed the scroll bar not going to the top when you change pages.
• Exclusively use class-based components. This is for consistency. There were class components and functional components, and there was no pattern for using one over the other. We're sticking to class components, as they allow us to easily add on functionality if we need the component to do something.
• Removed photo components. We had a set of components for creating images on the site. This was typically used in conjunction with a caption component in the same file. We no longer use these components, so they've been removed.
• Encapsulated everything to do with grids into React components. Before we were using Toast and applying classes where we wanted to use grids. Now we're using standard components for the same purpose, but now everything is contained and can be easily modified to effect everything at once.
• Added a method for getting the current year. This is used with the copyright at the bottom of the page. Now it doesn't need to be updated yearly.
• Added jQuery. This is a dependency of the contact form so we can use AJAX for submitting the form. This is on the to-do list for being removed in favor of a lightweight solution using XMLHttpRequest.

Webpack

• Updated extract-text-webpack-plugin.

Screenshots

Home page

About page

Contact page