Building a Website
Websites may vary in size and feature sets, but all have common features and functions at the heart of the website. Which boils down to content that needs to be stored and displayed or information that needs to be acquired from the users and stored or actioned upon.
Its always a good idea before designing a website to think about the needed features and pages required. Once you have a requirement list you can start to think about how the content and images should be stored, then how the content is going to be displayed and updated.
A Static Site Generator (SSG) is a great solution for building websites that contain a larger number of pages or where the content is likely to be updated frequently.
A SSG does require a little knowledge to work with. For making website updates you would need to be able to write and edit markdown files. This required knowledge can be reduced by making use of a Headless CMS to store the content, then a web form could be configured to provide an update route.
So I can hear you asking what does a SSG do?
Its a little like a food processor or sausage maker... You feed in your content pages along with the website theme, images and settings and out comes a full website into a folder that is ready to deploy to your hosting. Every time you update a websites content pages the SSG runs to make a deployable website.
Documentation Websites
If you require a website to make available documentation for a service or product. We can help you bring everything together to get the website setup and deployed.
The documentation content is assembled as a collection of markdown files and images which then are combined with a theme and settings file using a JS based documentation site generator.
The markdown files should be under version control and then any edit will start off a build and deploy process. The markdown files can then be updated directly using a code editor, however this does require knowledge of markdown and working with a version control system. Both of these are very teachable and since the launch of github.dev web-editor a lot more straight forward.
Or you could chose to store the documentation content in a Headless CMS and offer a web form for updating the content. This will reduced the knowledge required for making content updates.
Automated publishing
Once changes are made to the content files it can trigger a pipeline to start to run checks and then publish the files to a hosting service. This can be configured to deploy to a preview location or update the live website depending on your requirements.
If you are using Git & GitHub for version control then GitHub Actions are a great choice.
Automated Testing
Cross-browser and Cross-platform testing can be configured using Microsoft Playwright. The scope of testing required varies across projects but once defined these tests can be written and configured to run as required.
Ongoing support
We can provide as little or as much ongoing support as you require.
As an example we could offer a full service to keep the website updated and running. But if you would prefer, we can just update the software or the build and deploy pipeline.
