Creation Process
Before starting any work with clients, I always try to understand their niche and ask questions about what they aim to achieve with this software, whether it's gaining notoriety, reaching a larger audience, creating a tool to assist them, etc. This helps me precisely unravel what they want and ask other questions related to their goal.
In this case, I was tasked with creating a simple landing page for a music-related company to increase customer acquisition since they didn't have a website for promotions until then. Additionally, the company would like to be able to quickly, simply, and effectively edit some information regarding the artists they represent and showcase in their catalog.
By asking some other questions, such as functional and non-functional requirements, capturing and understanding the request, I was quickly able to outline a plan and create a small list of what I needed to do to deliver the website as quickly as possible.
Conception
This freelance project was developed entirely from scratch, from its design to deployment; there was nothing ready, only a logo from which I could derive the potential color palette I would use, as well as the font for the texts. Since the website was designed for customers to access and use the company's services, I used design and user experience standards to get straight to the point, while still maintaining a modern and elegant aesthetic, conveying a sense of reliability, seriousness, and client security to the company.
I previously made some sketches on Excalidraw to understand if it was really what the client would like, and after their approval, I did all the design and remastering of the company's logo in Figma, a software I always use to develop the design of my applications.
Development
With requirements and design in hand, it's time to code. As I wanted to do this project as quickly and efficiently as possible, I used frameworks, libraries, and tools that I already master and that would be very efficient in this work. The stack used was Typescript, ReactJS, NextJS (version 14 with Server Actions), TailwindCSS, Shadcn/ui, and Hygraph (CMS used for creating and editing content for artists). For sending emails, I used Resend with React Email.
During development, I focused on making a stylish, performant website with good usability and fully responsive, which ended up being a very simple and quick task with the use of these technologies.
Deployment
No mystery here, I decided to host it on Vercel. The company isn't very well-known and is unlikely to meet the requirements of the free Vercel plan. However, it's important to inform the client about all these deployment, hosting, and domain costs. Since the client already had a domain, it was easier to have this conversation, haha.
Overall, in terms of difficulty, it was quite easy to complete this project. I had fun and improved my skills by designing this application, and its development was quite smooth. The only somewhat annoying thing was actually talking to the client because the person in charge didn't provide many important details about the company for me to populate the landing page, so some information, such as the about section and artist data, was corrected practically a few hours before delivery 💀. But nothing too complicated!