Jan.Movies

Main goal was to try building a website from scratch using NodeJS, ReactJS, Webpack and Materialize-css.

Try the demo at http://jan-movies.surge.sh

The website itself represents a possible website promoting my movie-making skills (simplified version).

Project Status:

Finished for technology demonstation and practice purposes.

What'd need to be done to make it fully functional:

Enable/change some links' functionality.
Improve story told + possibly colors (depending on A/B testing).

What I learned:

To build a simple website for promotion of a product.
To tell a story and write an appealing content = storytelling was huge here for me.
Use Materialize-css framework + customize it.
That full-website deployment of NodeJS webpack-based can be a pain in the ass and making it work could be a miracle (unless you find something like surge.sh which solves your deployment nightmare, haha).
Sometimes sacrificing some extra tools can be a real win (usage of react-create-app) would solve many problems I struggled with.

Possible improvements for future:

Create responsivity - remove inline styling and create separate .css files for every part (component).
However, this website is really clean and simple, therefore perhaps customized graphics would help.
Add on-line e-mail form.
Dev vs deployment version, customized webpack setup.
HMR for faster developemnt.

Deployment:

Beware: just uploading the project on surge won't make it work, unless you pre-compile the index.js and image file locally - they are already in the project and surge will simply read them. Therefore, when changing something, re-compile the project using webpack ./src/main.js -> the files will be outputted to a new folder with the same name as the project has, you take them from there and copy to the original project (nasty workaround, just a quick deployment solution).

To run the project locally:

npm install (installing all packages and dependencies) npm start (staring the localhost server)